shakespearean tragedy katsan

question of causes of suffering

• Katsan views Shakespeare’s plays as intense treatment of the old age question about what causes suffering

• whether the causes are suffering are human weakness, divine retribution or arbitrary fate

• absence of a clear answer is central to Shakespearean tragedies

• while Shakespeare did not have a fully worked out theory on tragedy, his powerful and coherent sense of tragedy deepens with each tragic play

chaucer

• his limited definition of the word tragedy appears unhelpful and limited, however this enables the concept of tragedy to be powerful , marking it as universal and inexplicable

• it defines the inescapable trajectory of the tragic action but not its cause and who or what is responsible for the dire change of fortune

power of uncertainty

• for Shakespeare, uncertainty is the point - the characters may commit themselves in a confident sense of tragedy of the world but Shakespeare renders this as inadequate, leaving the characters to struggle unsuccessfully to construct a coherent worldview of old ruins

• Shakepseare’s tragedies provoke the questions about the cause of pain and loss the plays so antagonizingly portray - the questioning attitude of suffering prevent any confident attribution of meaning or value to human suffering

kenneth muir

• “there is no such thing as Shakespearian tragedy there are only Shakepearian tragedies”- merely begs the question of how ‘shakespearian’ modifies ‘tragedy’ either as an individual exemplar or as a group

• if keir muir is saying that shakespeare does not seem to have written tragedy driven by a fully developed theoretical conception of the genre we can easily assent

• but we can see a coherent sense of tragedy deepen throughout the plays

• tragedy for shakespeare is a genre of uncompensated suffering