Professor Harold Bloom observed, “Shakespeare will go on explaining us because he invented us,” in his book, Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human. Bloom’s argument is that Shakespeare understood and represented human nature better than anyone before or since and thus gave us the image of ourselves. If we study his images, we study ourselves. Today, let’s consider a persuasion force, dissonance, that drives one of Shakespeare’s largest images: tragedy.
We’ll pivot from Dr. Bloom to Professor A.C. Bradley and his analysis of Shakespeare art of tragedy. [FauxItAll Sidebar: If you like Shakespeare, you'd enjoy reading Professor Bradley's comments which you can acquire for free at Gutenberg. Even though Bradley was a 19th century academic, he writes with a modern style and an eternal insight; he is sharp.] Bradley explains how Shakespeare went about creating tragedy, how it was different from other tragedians before and after the Bard, and how Shakespeare made it happen. Consider this string of quotes.
“The centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing in action.”
“‘A tragedy is a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate,’ . . . that the story is one of human actions producing exceptional calamity and ending in the death of such a man.”
“There is the standard dramatic conflict of a clash between two competing individuals or groups. Shakespeare adds an additional conflict: a clash of desires, values, spirits within the hero. Call this the outer and inner conflicts.”
“. . . a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of mind. This, it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic trait.”
“He errs, by action or omission; and his error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin. This is always so with Shakespeare. As we have seen, the idea of the tragic hero as a being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as contributing to his destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw. But the fatal imperfection or error, which is never absent, is of different kinds and degrees.”
Taken in summary Bradley argues that Shakespeare creates tragedy from an internally directed person who strives greatly in great circumstances, but through the flaws of human nature, chooses a course of action that will produce suffering then catastrophic failure.
Othello kills Desdemona in cold justification, driven both by jealousy and pride as manipulated by Iago.
Macbeth joins with his wife to murder his way to the throne, justified by prophecy, vaulting ambition, and a prideful wife.
Richard II thinks poetry will lead a country and scans English verse to his death.
Richard III murders to the throne and explains it with his strength of character formed from his misformed body.
Hamlet broods and kills to no end at all, justified with his exquisite ability to find and value nuance of thought.
In all Shakespearian tragedies, the hero deliberately chooses in ways that cause him great suffering – existential doubt, murder, usurpation – yet he persists to his doom only occasionally realizing at the end that he was fortune’s fool. How can any human persist in such suffering and still be human?
Dissonance.
Shakespeare’s tragic characters all suffer for what they love and that suffering serves to intensify their drive, their choices, their actions and motivate the movement of the play to the ultimate disaster.
As readers or viewers of these plays, we can observe the errors, but it is up to the actor to sell the dissonance that must drive the suffering. If you see a performance of a Shakespearian tragedy and don’t feel compelled, you probably saw an actor who could not convince you of the psycho-logic dissonance causes. As a great example, I’ve seen King Lear both live and in films, but it wasn’t until I saw Laurence Olivier’s interpretation that I finally believed Lear and understood the play. Olivier made Lear’s suffering seem not honorable or foolish, but just Lear’s character, a man who loved his power more than his ability to understand it or use it wisely.
Shakespeare as near as I can discern did not understand dissonance in an overt and clear way and he certainly never tried to explain it. He just seemed to understand human nature and in particular this most strange thing called dissonance.
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