Учебное пособие 4 unit I. The renaissance 1485-1649

UNIT X.
THE TRAGEDIES
Shakespeare’s tragedies are among the most powerful studies of human
nature in all literature and appropriately stand as the greatest achievements of
his dramatic artistry. Attention understandably has focused on his
unforgettable tragic characters, such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello,
King Lear, and Macbeth. Ye t the plays also explore and extend the very
nature of tragedy itself by discovering within it a structure that derives
meaning precisely from its refusal to offer consolation or compensation for
the suffering it traces.
EARLY TRAGEDIES
Shakespeare wrote his first tragedies in 1594 and 1595. But he left the

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field of tragedy untouched for at least five years after finishing Romeo and
Juliet, probably in 1595, and turned to comedy and history plays. Julius
Caesar, written about 1599, served as a link between the history plays and the
mature tragedies that followed.
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Titus Andronicus
, thought to have been Shakespeare’s first tragedy,
moves at a frantic pace through successive sensational episodes of violence
and revenge. Returning from war against the Goths, the Roman general Titus
sacrifices Alarbus, son of Empress Tamora of the Goths, in honour of the
death of his own sons during the campaign. The sacrifice, together with
Titus’s involvement in the selection of the new emperor of Rome, triggers a
chain of violent acts that does not cease until both families have been
slaughtered. At the conclusion of the play, only Lucius, Titus’s one
remaining son, is left to bring about a restoration of order. At the point that
has been reached in Act 3, Scene i, Titus is pleading in vain with the Roman
tribunes to free two of his sons, who have been wrongly accused and
sentenced to death for the murder of their brother-in-law. Titus’s misery is
compounded by the arrival of his brother Marcus, who has found Titus’s
daughter, Lavinia, raped and mutilated—her tongue and hands cut off so that
she cannot identify her attackers. Titus is then tricked into cutting off his own
hand by Aaron, Tamora’s lover, who convinces him that it is the only way to
save his sons. The horrifying scene reaches its climax when the hand,
together with the heads of the young men, is delivered back to Titus, leaving
him hysterical, and vowing revenge. The bloody violence in the play reaches
outrageous, even ridiculous, extremes—yet there is dignity in the verse with
which Titus, Marcus, and Lucius express the depth of their grief.
The earliest tragedy attributed to Shakespeare is
Titus Andronicus
(published in 1594). In its treatment of murder, mutilation, and bloody
revenge, the play is characteristic of many popular tragedies of the
Elizabethan period (see Revenge Tragedy). The structure of a spectacular
revenge for earlier heinous and bloody acts, all of which are staged in
sensational detail, derives from Roman dramatist Seneca. It probably reached
Shakespeare by way of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1589).
Shakespeare’s gory tragedy proved highly successful in Shakespeare’s time.
But later audiences found the violent excesses of
Titus Andronicus
absurd or
disgusting, and only recently has the play’s theatrical power been
rediscovered. From the 1960s on, many directors and critics have recognized
in the play’s daring exploration of violence concerns that go beyond the
merely sensationalistic to address some of the deepest fears and

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preoccupations of the modern world.