Some Thoughts on Re-Reading Shakespeare's Four Major Tragedies

I went back to Shakespeare recently and re-read his four major tragedies – Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth – one after the other, in that order. They are plays I know well but reading them straight through over the course of a day made me see them in a different light. Here are a few thoughts that came to me as I read:

HAMLET

Polonius is badly served by productions of Hamlet. In the ones I have seen, he has almost always been reduced to a figure of fun, a comic foil for Hamlet. Hamlet’s description of him as a ‘tedious old fool’ and Gertrude’s impatience with his long-windedness also serve to make him seem like a buffoon. But the same character’s advice to Laertes – ‘And these few precepts in thy memory / See thou character…’ is one of the best speeches that Shakespeare ever wrote – full of wisdom born of harsh experience and as practical today as it would have been four hundred years ago. It also features one of the greatest couplets Shakespeare ever wrote: ‘Those friends thou hast and their adoption tried / Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.’  This same ‘old fool’ is a domineering father who bullies daughter and sends Reynaldo to spy on Laertes using subtle, cruel methods.

Hamlet’s attitude towards Ophelia and the dead Polonius is still very puzzling. In the last act, when he realises that the corpse of the suicide being buried is that of Desdemona, Hamlet claims he loved Desdemona more than ‘twenty thousand brothers’.  But when he accidentally kills Polonius, whose death triggers Ophelia’s madness, he shows no remorse and only calls him a ‘wretched, rash, intruding fool’. I would have thought that if he really did love Ophelia, his first thoughts would be about the impact of the killing on her.

OTHELLO  

Iago is disturbingly familiar. Though his soliloquies that frame events in the play, Iago succeeds in involving the audience in the gulling of Othello and drags the audience down to the gutter with him. He is a tremendously unpleasant character who haunts literature and is a reminder of the human capacity to store up massive reserves of secret hatred, like the people who vomit their fury in chatrooms, on message boards and on comments sections on the internet. He does this literally in the first scene when he shouts up to Brabantio’s window filthy, racist comments about Othello and Desdemona.

KING LEAR

Of the four plays, King Lear is the most enjoyable to read. Hamlet is the most dazzling and perplexing of the four plays. Othello is the most immediately accessible, the one that has at its centre a love story that is poisoned and corrupted. King Lear has the best balance of characters and is the most consistently exciting of the plays. It is the most action-packed one with plenty of violence (beating, kicking, stocking, eye-gouging, stabbing, duelling), stormy weather, angry confrontations (Lear v Cordelia, Kent v Lear, Lear v Oswald, Kent v Oswald, Lear v Goneril, Kent v Oswald again, Regan and Cornwall v Kent, Lear v Goneril and Regan, Regan and Cornwall v Gloucester, Cornwall’s servant v Cornwall, Albany v Goneril, Oswald v Edgar, the French army v the British army, Goneril v Regan, Albany v Edmund, Edgar v Edmund, Albany v Goneril) and plenty of deaths (Cornwall’s servant, Cornwall, Oswald, Regan, Goneril, Edmund, Gloucester, Cordelia, Lear and possibly the Fool). And a lot less thinking than the other three.

However, Lear is also the play that requires the greatest leap of imagination. The sceptical need to accept several moments that feel implausible. How can Gloucester and Edgar be so gullible, so willing to accept Edmund’s phony suspicions and bogus warnings?  Does Edgar need to play the filthy, blabbering mad beggar with such manic volubility?  Does Gloucester really believe he is at the edge of a cliff? Wouldn’t he put his hands over the edge to feel the sharp decline?  Would Lear really be able to kill the man who hanged Cordelia? Like ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and Friar Laurence’s potion in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, King Lear requires a good dose of ‘a willing suspension of disbelief.’

Unlike the other heroes, Lear is never alone. This may have been the norm for kings, who would have been constantly surrounded by courtiers. And thus, all his pronouncements are public – at no point does he make a soliloquy, unlike the tortured Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. Lear does not plot or connive – the moment he swears revenge on his daughters is famously pathetic. 

MACBETH

Macbeth is shockingly short, less than half the length of Hamlet and Lear and substantially slimmer than Othello. The scene set in England where Malcolm tests Macduff’s loyalty feels long when you see it in performance but it only seems like that because the other scenes in Macbeth are so rapid.

There is a marked lack of goodness in Macbeth. Unlike the other plays, where there are some acts of decency and moments to mitigate the floods of cruelty, almost everyone seems flawed or tainted by Macbeth’s tyranny. The hero Macduff leaves his family to be slaughtered; though he suspects Macbeth of having killed Duncan, Banquo’s self-interest inhibits him, the other thanes are weak and beaten down, full of self-pity and the would-be king Malcolm is suspicious and manipulative. There are no shining beacons of compassion like Desdemona or Cordelia and no loyal friends like Horatio in this world of brutal realpolitik. The only characters who appear genuinely innocent (besides Fleance) are Macduff’s wife and son who berate their protector’s disappearance, and the treachery of all men, before they are murdered by Macbeth’s henchmen.