This post gathers four sets of notes on the chapters in Emma Smith’s book This is Shakespeare which cover the four great tragedies. The individual links below also provide players for the equivalent podcast episodes from Approaching Shakespeare.

Click to go to the original posts: King Lear | Hamlet | Macbeth | Othello.

King Lear

For Emma Smith, King Lear is a kind of mirror for succeeding generations of audiences and readers. In the words at the end of the Lear chapter in This is Shakespeare, the attempts to ameliorate its desolation present us with a cultural history of just what it is we want from our tragic art: comfort, exhilaration or dissection.

The chapter leads up to that point by giving an overview of the shifting different points of view the play has prompted since its writing in 1606, starting with the oddness of a performance of this most desolate tragedy for James 1 in the Palace of Whitehall on a day of celebration, Boxing Day. Emma Smith regards its protean reception over the years as

An object lesson in attempts to understand the ethical value of Shakespearean tragedy.

Generations have tried to excavate something positive or optimistic from the evident misery, most famously in terms of performance in the notorious Nahum Tate rewriting 0f 1681, which lasted for a long time on the English stage. Tate was writing from the perspective of Charles II’s restored monarchy, and this is evident in his own doctored ending.

Emma Smith then surveys critics like Dr Johnson (Tate’s amelioration of the ending was welcome), August Schlegel (the Romantics began to discover the delicious terrors of the original), A.C. Bradley and G. Wilson Knight (the former saw the transformative powers of torment), Jan Kott in Shakespeare our Contemporary (for who it is a blank verse ‘Waiting for Godot’: inevitably, Godot never arrives, and the time between the curtains is filled absurdist humour, violence, abjection and grim bonding - I’d say that Godot is rather more consoling and tender) and Jonathan Dollimore (a more social critique rather than one based on individualist ideology).

Everyone gets the ‘Lear’ they need, rewriting as necessary through adaptation, criticism and also through performances. In fact Shakespere himself rewrote and revised the story between the History and the Tragedy. For example, the lines between the second and third servants after Gloucester’s blinding were removed from the darker ‘Tragedy’. What the playwright himself did was deepen the darkness.

Smith’s analysis here makes me think of a line from another tragedy, Hamlet, in which the protagonist asks the players to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature. King Lear does just that, showing us just what we are, and what we believe about human nature.

Hamlet

Like Gabriel Josipovici, whose 2016 book Hamlet Fold on Fold I commented on recently, Emma Smith sees Shakespeare’s play as one in which forward movement is stymied, and of course this is seen primarily though the central character:

Hamlet’s actions tends towards undoing and negation rather than doing or progress: he breaks off his relationship with Ophelia; he does not return to university; he wants the players to perform an old fashioned speech ’if it live in your memory’; his primary attachments are to the dead not the living. The play’s iconic visual moment - Hamlet facing the skull of the jester Yorick - epitomises a drama, and a psychology, in thrall to the past.

She recognises that seeing the play as being preoccupied by the past might seem ‘perverse’, given the tendency to regard it as ‘Shakespeare as his most modern’, and that this makes it ‘hard for us to register the ways it is deeply retrospective in tone’. This is seen even in the choice Shakespeare makes to double the names of both Hamlet and Fortinbras, with both younger men tied by their naming to their fathers (Young Hamlet being unable to ‘form an autonomous identity for himself’). Right at the start Marcellus asks if the ‘thing’ has appeared ‘again’:

That word ‘again’ tells us the ghost is double reiterative, symbolising the recurrent past.

When the Ghost does speak, he ‘pulls Hamlet away from the future and into the past’.

Emma Smith points out that the charge of this play written about 1600 must partly have been the issue of succession, as the childless Elizabeth I approached 70. To some extent this concern about succession makes Hamlet aligned with the history plays, which

Interweave patrilineal and fraternal rivalries within the family and state, marginalizing women and rehearsing versions of regime change.

Fortinbras’s succession to the throne of Denmark at the end is hardly a triumphantly promising indicator for the future. Instead,

As an image of late Elizabethan political anxieties, it’s a bleak ending.

She considers the issue of religion to be connected to this backward-looking tendency in the play, including of course the question of the ghost (is Hamlet, as Stephen Greenblatt suggests, ‘a Protestant son haunted by the ghost of a Catholic father'?). Another component in that strain is theatrical, in its relationship to Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and to the pre-history of London theatres, as seen in the dumbshow in Act 3 which precedes the Murder of Gonzago:

The play then repeats this mimed action, this time verbally. This dramaturgical split between saying and doing is rather apt for the whole play… in which the relationship between speech and action is so famously fraught.

She also addresses the extraordinary face, much commented-on (including by Freud), that Shakespeare chose for his central character(s) a name so close to his own son’s, Hamnet, who died tragically 4 years before the play was written (Maggie O’Farrell explored this with the licence of a novelist in Hamnet):

So can authorial biography help with ‘Hamlet’? Clearly this is a play preoccupied by grief and by mourning, a play that looks backwards to something painfully unrecoverable.

In summary, Emma Smith believes that the the ‘cumulative nostalgia’ driving the play

Helps us to see ‘Hamlet’ as a symptom of its own historical moment rather than, as is more usual, thinking about it solipsistically as the anticipation of ours.

Macbeth

‘Macbeth’ asks why things happen: that we still can’t answer is key to its unsettling hold on our imagination.

So ends the relevant chapter in Emma Smith’s book This is Shakespeare. I have already written notes on Othello, starting those with reference to what Smith calls ‘gappiness’. Here are some notes on that chapter in the book, which is quite closely based on her lecture at Oxford University.

Agency is the key idea in Emma Smith’s analysis; she starts by stating that Macbeth shares with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

the distinctly Renaissance project to investigate the human mind, and a curiosity about the causes and explanations for feelings and behaviours.

And she asks

Is this a story in which Macbeth, willingly or unwillingly, directs the action of his own play? Or is it better understood as a story in which he is acted upon by other people? Might we see him puppeted by supernatural forces beyond his control?

This is

a play that is more interested in exploring its own competing aetiologies [explanations of cause] than explaining them.

Emma Smith examines the usual suspects for any agency that is not from within Macbeth himself - the witches and his wife. The former seem to interpose in a chain of human actions, rather than to direct actions themselves.

The Holinshed source presents a much cruder version of the story, but Shakespeare moves the story towards a proper tragedy: Duncan is not the equivalent of a gangland boss (as in the 1997 TV film Macbeth on the Estate - watch it online) but instead an admirable King whose murder is clearly a transgression against the natural order:

The sense of moral outrage and disturbance in Macbeth is Shakespeare’s invention.

The witches do not return at the end of the play, which we might expect, since they were the first figures we saw, and their powers are clearly limited (as in the story of the Tiger) [this is similar to Lady Macbeth who seems in I v likely to be central, and yet drifts away into irrelevance in the second half of the story]. Are they a form of internal voice?

Back to the comment at the start of this post. Malcolm’s description of Macbeth as a dead butcher (with a fiend-like wife) is understandable given that his father was murdered, but it is definitely ‘gappy’ given our own theatrical experience: we have witnessed something more complex, something intimate and something for which such a reductive label is not adequate.

Othello

One of the very best books on Shakespeare in recent years is This is Shakespeare, by the Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, Emma Smith. She ranges brilliantly across 20 of the plays, examining

The artistic and ideological and artistic implications of Shakespeare’s silences, inconsistencies and, above all, the sheer and permissive gappiness of his drama.

This ‘gappiness’ is central to Emma Smith’s analyses of the plays:

Shakespeare’s construction of his plays tends to imply rather than state; he often shows, rather than tells; most characters and encounters are susceptible to multiple interpretations. It’s because we have to fill in the gaps that Shakespeare is so vital.

Some notes:

The central thesis is that Othello is protean: it has ‘always been able to transform itself’, its ‘gappiness’ allowing ‘a particular space for us’. This remains the case for our age, since we continue to be concerned about ‘race, difference and belonging.’ [Check out Red Bull Theater’s Othello 2020 project, which is currently examining these ideas]. Emma Smith asks:

Is this a racist play in which a black man is driven to homicidal rage, revealing that his civilization is only skin-deep? Or a plea for a more tolerant society in which Othello and Desdemona’s marriage might flourish?

Othello is ‘denigrated’ by others. The etymology is a giveaway, coming from the Latin for ‘black’, and so ‘to blacken’.
The preoccupation with sex is ‘a voyeuristic preoccupation’, all the way from the terms Iago uses (the ‘black ram’) to the final scene in the bedchamber, where the play ‘homes in on the ultimate object of its erotic obsession’, the bed.
Othello is regarded in two ways at the start of the play: he has eloped with Desdemona without her father’s knowledge or permission, but he is also a potential saviour of Venice in his professional military role. That doubleness (a form of ‘gappiness’ - what exactly is he?) will permeate the play, and our reactions to him.
‘The Moor of Venice’: Emma Smith interrogates that ‘of’ (listen to the podcast below in which she talks about the phrase). There can indeed be a ‘Merchant of Venice’ but not a Jew of Venice, let alone a Moor of the great city. Othello is in an

estranged position as both a Moor and ‘of Venice’, the commander of Venetian forces and the unacceptable son-in-law, the Christian citizen’s defender against a malignant Turk, and that turbaned and circumcised Turk himself.

There is a long critical tradition which looks at two possible interpretations of ‘Moor’, ‘a word with dense historical associations’ including the geographical link with Mauretania, the more general religious meaning of ‘Muslim’, and then the racist stereotyping of sub-Saharan Africa, and so even the word ‘Moor’ is slippery, another ‘gappy’ word. Is Othello a Christian convert? If so, is the suggestion that he merely has a patina of ‘self-control, social, integration, lucidity, rationality’ a loaded version of ‘Christian’ values?

The question of which kind of ‘Moor’ Othello should represent was crucial to the sympathy we were to feel for him, and thus to the whole notion of tragedy in the play.

Another doubleness in our sympathies: with Othello as a man abused and destroyed by a racist society, or with Desdemona, ‘dead at the hands of a man she loved and trusted’? Desdemona started with her own voice (heard in Act 1 in her riposte to her father’s pleas), but eventually is literally silenced by her husband, who murders her:

Thus the play, and its main character, ends on a fissure, an incompatible religious and ethnic split played out on the impossible identity of its central protagonist, who is destroyed by its unbearable cognitive dissonance.

Othello’s identity might be impossible because he is a living ‘cognitive dissonance’: a successful black man in a white society, a man who marries into that society and yet is never ‘of’ it, a Christian who may have been a Muslim, a man of immense self-control (‘Keep up your bright swords’) who loses all control, professionally a brilliant soldier and leader (he must be, to reach that position) and yet utterly clueless and gullible in the domestic sphere. A debate over the years: is the play itself racist, or does it explore racism?
Outsiders: it is not just the obvious outsider that the play examines: in fact, all three central characters are “different outsiders struggling with their own disempowered status in the majority society.” and “Othello, Iago and Desdemona all struggle to be autonomous selves within the confines of what is expected and assumed about them by others.”
She sees Othello as close to comedy at times. It starts (like A Midsummer Night’s Dream) with a classic comedy trope: the father who tries to forbid his daughter making a romantic choice of which he disapproves. Other moments are close to comedy or farce (such as the scene when Iago prompts Cassio into laughter about Bianca, and Othello thinks they are discussing Desdemona; the handkerchief is ‘a comic prop’). “Act 1 of Othello is a miniature comedy of lovers overcoming differences or circumstances to be together in spite of the blocking figures”:

Elsewhere in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the figure of the jealous husband, paranoid about cuckoldry and over-interpreting the most innocent of details to corroborate his desperate fantasies of his wife’s infidelity, is firmly comic.

Again, as a tragedy which veers very close so regularly to the comic, the comic resolution is almost within grasp as Emilia forces her way into the bedroom and raises the alarm. But (as in the story of Romeo and Juliet) she is just too late. Iago was so close to being exposed in time, but by the time he is, this is irrelevant.