addressed to a Stella or a Delia, named in the title. The selling point ofShake-speares
Sonnetswas the name of the author. Yet the book was never reprinted, unlike Ve n u s
and Adonisand Lucrece, which sold far more copies than any of the play-quartos.
There is one area in which the dramatized voice may be personal. ‘Shall I compare
thee to a summer’s day’ ends: ‘So long as men can breathe and eyes can see / So long
lives this and this gives life to thee.’ The claim is that this poem will live to the end of
time,or for as long as men read English verse aloud. The brag is Shakespeare’s. Yet
the claim has to be surrendered. The poet concedes in 126 that the ‘lovely boy’ must
be rendered by Nature to Time, the enemy of human love. Two Christian sonnets, 55
and 146, look beyond death and Doomsday, but the series is this-worldly.Shake-
speares Sonnets may contain our finest love-poems, but the note is not often that of
‘the lark at break of day arising’. The sequence dramatizes the misery of love in this
world more than its splendours.Tr a g e d y
Julius Caesar is based on Thomas North’s 1579 version of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble
Grecians and Romans. It is a play of rhetorical power and unusual lucidity, if with a
double focus. The murder of Caesar exemplified the medieval idea of tragedy: the
downfall of a great man. Dante had put the assassins Brutus and Cassius alongside
Judas in the lowest circle of hell, for treason to one’s lord was then the worst sin. But
Brutus is the other hero of the play, an honourable man who makes a tragic mistake.
Reformers like John Knox (1513–1572) justified tyrannicide. But the noble Brutus,
for what seems to him a good reason, commits murder, and his murder and treason
haunt him. He is, however, accorded the introspective soliloquies characteristic of
Shakespeare’ s tragic heroes. More generally characteristic of Shakespeare’s drama-
turgy is the double dramatic focus on Caesar and Brutus.This doubleness, with
implicit comparison and transfer of sympathy, was first seen in Richard II, is in many
ofthe plays,and in the title ofAntony and Cleopatra.
The four great tragedies – Hamlet,Othello,King Lear and Macbeth– do not
conform strictly to a defined type, except that each ends in the death of the hero, just
as the comedies end in marriage. Each finds the noble protagonist in an evil plight.
Hamlet exclaims, ‘The time is out of joint. O cursed spite! / That ever I was born to
set it right.’ Such a mismatch is one basis of tragedy: Hamlet is a humanist prince in
a Gothic family; Othello is a warrior in a world of love and intrigue; Coriolanus is a
Homeric Achilles in modern politics. In the Britain ofLear, goodness has to go into
exile or disguise ifit is to survive. But Lear is partly responsible for his own tragedy,
and Macbeth almost entirely so: it is he who disjoints the time.
Shakespeare did not adhere to one model of tragedy, despite the continuing
popularity of A. C. Bradley’s ‘tragic flaw’ theory. In his Shakespearean Tragedy
(1904),Bradley famously proposed that each of the tragic heroes has such a flaw:
ambition in Macbeth, jealousy in Othello. This misapplies the Poetics of Aristotle,
who did not speak of the protagonist’s character except to say that he should be
noble but not so noble that we cannot identify with him. Aristotle’s penetrating
analysis was based on action, finding that tragedy proceeds from a tragic mistake –
as when Oedipus marries his mother in ignorance – rather than a character-flaw
such as jealousy. The tragedies can be understood without Aristotle, even if
Shakespeare knew of Aristotle’s notion that a tragedy would inspire feelings of ‘pity
and fear’ – as is suggested by the words ‘woe or wonder’ in Horatio’s lines at the end128 4 · SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA