Mimesis (56 page)

The dramatic occurrences of human life were seen by antiquity predominantly in the form of a change of fortune breaking in upon man from without and from above. In Elizabethan tragedy on the other hand—the first specifically modern form of tragedy—the hero’s individual character plays a much greater part in shaping his destiny. This is, I believe, the prevailing view, and on the whole it appears to me to be correct. But it needs to be qualified and supplemented. In the introduction to an edition of Shakespeare which I have before me (
The Complete Works of W.S
., London and Glasgow, n.d., Introduction by St. John Ervine, p. xii) I find it expressed in the following terms: “And here we come on the great difference between the Greek and the Elizabethan drama: the tragedy in the Greek plays is an arranged one in which the characters have no decisive part. Theirs but to do and die. But the tragedy in the Elizabethan plays comes straight from the heart of the people themselves. Hamlet is Hamlet, not because a capricious god has compelled him to move to a tragic end, but because there is a unique essence in him which makes him incapable of behaving in any other way than he does.” And the critic continues by emphasizing Hamlet’s freedom of action, which allows him to doubt and hesitate before he comes to a decision—a freedom of action which Oedipus and Orestes do not possess. In this form the contrast is formulated too absolutely. It is not possible to deny Euripides’ Medea a “unique essence” and even freedom of action or to overlook the fact that she has moments of indecision when she fights her own gruesome passion. Indeed, even Sophocles, that almost model representative of classical antiquity, shows at the beginning of his
Antigone
, in the conversation between the two sisters, an example of two persons who find themselves in exactly the same situation but who decide—without any pressure of fate and purely in accordance with their own particular characters—in favor of different courses of conduct. Yet the English
critic’s basic idea is sound: in Elizabethan tragedy and specifically in Shakespeare, the hero’s character is depicted in greater and more varied detail than in antique tragedy, and participates more actively in shaping the individual’s fate. But it is also possible to describe the difference in another way: one might say that the idea of destiny in Elizabethan tragedy is both more broadly conceived and more closely linked to the individual character than it is in antique tragedy. In the latter, fate means nothing but the given tragic complex, the present network of events in which a particular person is enmeshed at a particular moment. To whatever else may have happened to him during his life, so long as it is not part of the prehistory of the present conflict, to what we call his “milieu,” little attention is given, and apart from age, sex, social status, and references to his general type of temperament, we learn nothing about his normal existence. The essence of his personality is revealed and evolves exclusively within the particular tragic action; everything else is omitted. All this is based upon the way in which antique drama arose and on its technical requirements. Freedom of movement, which it reached only very slowly, is much less, even in Euripides, than in the modern drama. In particular, the above-mentioned strict limitation to the given tragic conflict is based upon the fact that the subjects of antique tragedy are almost exclusively taken from the national mythology, in a few cases from national history. These were sacred subjects and the events and personages involved were known to the audience. The “milieu” too was known, and furthermore it was almost always approximately the same. Hence there was no reason to describe its special character and special atmosphere. Euripides challenged the tradition by introducing new interpretations, both of action and character, into the traditional material. But this can hardly be compared with the multiplicity of subject matter, the freedom of invention and presentation which distinguish the Elizabethan and the modern drama generally. What with the great variety of subject matter and the considerable freedom of movement of the Elizabethan theater, we are in each instance given the particular atmosphere, the situation, and the prehistory of the characters. The course of events on the stage is not rigidly restricted to the course of events of the tragic conflict but covers conversations, scenes, characters, which the action as such does not necessarily require. Thus we are given a great deal of “supplementary information” about the principal personages; we are enabled to form an idea of their normal lives and particular characters apart from the complication in which they
are caught at the moment. Thus fate here means much more than the given conflict. In antique tragedy it is almost always possible to make a clear distinction between the natural character of a personage and the fate which befalls him at the moment. In Elizabethan tragedy we are in most cases confronted not with purely natural character but with character already formed by birth, situation in life, and prehistory (that is, by fate)—character in which fate has already had a great share before it fulfils itself in the form of a specified tragic conflict. The latter is often only the occasion which releases a tragic situation prepared long before. This is particularly apparent in the cases of Shylock and Lear. What happens to them individually, is individually predestined for them; it fits the specific character of Shylock or of Lear, and this character is not only the natural character but one prepared by birth, situation, and prehistory, that is, by fate, for its unmistakable idiosyncrasy and for the tragic situation destined for it.

We have already mentioned one of the causes or at least premises of this far more broadly conceived presentation of human destiny: the theater of the Elizabethans offers a much more varied human world than did the antique theater. Its range of subject matter covers all lands and times and all the combinations of fancy. There are themes from English and Roman history, from the legendary past, from novelle and fairy tales. The places of the action are England, Scotland, France, Denmark, Italy, Spain, the islands of the Mediterranean, the Orient, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Egypt. The exotic appeal which Venice, Verona, and the like had for an English audience in the year 1600 is an element that was virtually—not to say completely—unknown to the theater of the ancients. A figure like Shylock’s raises through its mere existence problems outside the sphere of the classical drama. Here we must point out that the sixteenth century had attained a comparatively high level of historical consciousness and historical perspective. For a similar development the antique theater had little occasion, because the range of its subject matter was too limited and because the antique audience did not regard any form of life and culture except its own either as equal in value or as worthy of artistic attention. During the Middle Ages all practical acquaintance with alien forms of life and culture was lost. Although two past cultures—the antique and the Judaeo-Christian—were of great importance within the frame of medieval civilization, and although both of them, especially the Judaeo-Christian, were often portrayed in literature and art, there was yet such a lack of historical consciousness and perspective
that the events and characters of those distant epochs were simply transferred to the present forms and conditions of life: Caesar, Aeneas, Pilate became knights, Joseph of Arimathaea a burgher, and Adam a farmer, of twelfth or thirteenth century France, England, or Germany.

With the first dawn of humanism, there began to be a sense that the events of classical history and legend and also those of the Bible were not separated from the present simply by an extent of time but also by completely different conditions of life. Humanism with its program of renewal of antique forms of life and expression creates a historical perspective in depth such as no previous epoch known to us possessed: the humanists see antiquity in historical depth, and, against that background, the dark epochs of the intervening Middle Ages. It makes no difference what errors of conception and interpretation they may have been guilty of in detail—the vision in perspective was gained. From Dante on it is possible to detect traces of such a historical perspective; in the sixteenth century it grows more distinct and more widely known, and even though, as we shall see, the tendency to accept antiquity as an absolute model and to neglect everything pertaining to the intervening centuries threatened to expel historical perspective from men’s consciousness again, it was never successful to the extent of reestablishing the autarchic life natural to antique culture or the historical naïveté of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In addition there is in the sixteenth century the effect of the great discoveries which abruptly widened the cultural and geographic horizon and hence also men’s conception of possible forms of human life. The various European peoples came to regard themselves as national entities and hence grew conscious of their distinctive characteristics. Finally the schism in the Church contributed to differentiating various groups of people. In consequence the comparatively simple contrast of Greek or Roman versus barbarian or Christian versus heathen was replaced by a much more complex picture of human society. This did not happen all at once; it was prepared over a long period of time; but in the sixteenth century it progresses by leaps and bounds, adding enormously both to the breadth of perspective and to the number of individuals acquiring it. The world of realities in which men live is changed; it grows broader, richer in possibilities, limitless. And it changes correspondingly when it appears as the subject matter of artistic representation. The sphere of life represented in a particular instance is no longer the only one possible or a part of that only and clearly circumscribed one. Very often there is a switch from one
sphere to another, and even in cases where this does not occur, we are able to discern as the basis of the representation a freer consciousness embracing an unlimited world. We have commented upon this in connection with Boccaccio and especially in connection with Rabelais; we could also have done so in connection with Montaigne. In Elizabethan tragedy and particularly in Shakespeare, perspective consciousness has become a matter of course, although it is neither very precise nor uniformly expressed. Shakespeare and the authors of his generation sometimes have erroneous ideas about foreign lands and cultures; they sometimes intentionally mingle contemporary scenes and allusions with a foreign theme, as for example the observations on the London stage in
Hamlet
. Quite often Shakespeare makes the setting of a play some fairyland only loosely connected with real times and places. But this too is only a playing upon the perspective view. Consciousness of the manifold conditions of human life is a fact with him, and he can take it for granted on the part of his audience.

Within a specific theme there is still another type of evidence of perspective consciousness. Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries are averse to completely detaching a turn of fortune which concerns a single person or a limited number of persons from its general context of events and presenting it on a single level of style, as the tragic poets of antiquity had done and wherein their sixteenth and seventeenth century imitators even outdid them at times. This isolating procedure, which is to be explained through the religious, mythological, and technical premises of the antique theater, is out of keeping with the concept of a magical and polyphonic cosmic coherence which arose during the Renaissance. Shakespeare’s drama does not present isolated blows of fate, generally falling from above and involving but a few people in their effects, while the milieu is limited to the few persons indispensable to the progress of the action; on the contrary, it offers inner entanglements which result from given conditions and from the interplay of variously constituted characters and in which not only the milieu but even the landscape, even the spirits of the dead and other supernatural beings participate. And the role of these participants often contributes nothing at all or at least very little to the progress of the action, but instead consists in a sympathetic counterpoint—a parallel or contrary motion on various levels of style. There is an abundance of secondary actions and secondary characters which, in terms of the economy of the principal action, could be entirely dispensed with or at least greatly reduced. Instances are the Gloucester episode
in
Lear
, the scene between Pompey and Menas in
Antony and Cleopatra
(2, 7), many scenes and characters in
Hamlet
—everybody can add to the list. Naturally, such actions and characters are not completely useless in the dramatic economy. Even a minor character like Osric in
Hamlet
is rendered so fully because he releases a significant reflex of Hamlet’s temperament and momentary state of mind. Yet for the progress of the action, Osric need not have been fully rendered. Shakespeare’s dramatic economy is prodigally lavish; it bears witness to his delight in rendering the most varied phenomena of life, and this delight in turn is inspired by the concept that the cosmos is everywhere interdependent, so that every chord of human destiny arouses a multitude of voices to parallel or contrary motion. The storm into which Regan drives her old father, the king, is not an accident; it is contrived by magic powers which are mobilized to bring the event to a crisis, and the fool’s speeches, and Poor Tom’s later, are voices from the same cosmic orchestra, although their function within the purely rational structure of the action is very slight. But they bring with them a rich scale of stylistic levels, which, within the prevailing key—the sublime—descends to farce and sheer nonsense.

This stylistic situation is characteristically Elizabethan and Shakespearean, but it is rooted in popular tradition, and indeed first of all in the cosmic drama of the story of Christ. There are intermediate steps and it is also true that a variety of folkloristic motifs not of Christian origin have forced their way in. But the creatural view of man, the loose construction with its numerous accessory actions and characters, and the mixture of the sublime with the low cannot in the last analysis come from any other source than the medieval Christian theater, in which all these things were necessary and essential. Even the participation of the elements in a great destiny has its best-known model in the earthquake at the time of Christ’s death (Matthew 27: 51ff.), and this model had remained very influential during the Middle Ages (cf.
Chanson de Roland
, 1423ff. or
Vita Nova
, 23). Yet now, in the drama of the Elizabethans, the superstructure of the whole has been lost; the drama of Christ is no longer the general drama, is no longer the point of confluence of all the streams of human destiny. The new dramatized history has a specific human action as its center, derives its unity from that center, and the road has been opened for an autonomously human tragedy. The great order of the past—Fall, Divine Sacrifice, Last Judgment—recedes, the human drama finds its order within itself; and it is at this point that antique precedent intervenes
with plot-complication, crisis, and tragic resolution; the division of the action into acts is from the same source. But the freedom of tragedy, and the realm of man generally, no longer acknowledge the limits of antiquity. The dissolution of medieval Christianity, running its course through a series of great crises, brings out a dynamic need for self-orientation, a will to trace the secret forces of life. Through this need and will, magic and science, the elemental sphere and the moral and human sphere, become mutually related. An immense system of sympathy seems to pervade the universe. Furthermore Christianity had conceived the problems of humanity (good and evil, guilt and destiny) more excitingly, antithetically, and even paradoxically than had antiquity. Even after the solution contained in the drama of original sin and salvation began to lose its validity, the more deeply stirring conception of the problem and the related ideas of the nature of man long remained influential. In Shakespeare’s work the liberated forces show themselves as fully developed yet still permeated with the entire ethical wealth of the past. Not much later the restrictive countermovements gained the upper hand. Protestantism and the Counter Reformation, absolutistic ordering of society and intellectual life, academic and puristic imitation of antiquity, rationalism and scientific empiricism, all operated together to prevent Shakespeare’s freedom in the tragic from continuing to develop after him.