Albany

Summary

Many regard themselves, and want us to regard them, as professional on the subject of that species of drama conveniently covered by the term ‘tragedy’. Listen, they say, and we shall tell you what Agamemnon or Othello is about. But it is my view that the actual spiritual economics of a particular tragedy is not easy to apprehend or to grasp. Is there gain or loss in Macbeth? Gain in what, loss in what? Because we are what we are, pain and death are focal, and we cannot help recalling King Lear as the blinding of Gloucester and the death of Cordelia, as though these had constituted the totality of our reactions to the play. But we also sometimes remember that always at the end of every Shakespeare tragedy there is a kind of recovery. The least emotional reaction we have had, then, at that moment, is that the preceding events were terrible but they are now over. However, I have always felt that this is too simple, not completely true to our experience of the tragedy. Our final ease in the theatre or in the armchair (I think we all have it, to a greater or lesser degree), is due to some realization, conscious in a greater or lesser degree, that all that has happened in the drama we have just witnessed or read was not depressing. Sometimes it is the spiritual growth of the protagonist or an enemy—Macbeth or Macduff—that we sense or acknowledge. Sometimes it is the ineluctable surprise that evil seems productive of good, that the worse the degradation of humanity on the stage, the greater the consequent exaltation. Shockingly, blood and pain and death and betrayal appear to be the dung that makes the flower grow. How great Emilia is in the last act of Othello! But she would have remained a menial, the play seems to say, had no destruction occurred. Watch her as she develops stature, depth, complexity, courage: she becomes more real, more fine, as the scenes break and darken around her.