Medium and Message in As You Like It and King Lear

Summary

It is not surprising that in the constant talk of Shakespeare’s ‘tragic vision’ and ‘comic vision’ the fact that ‘vision’, properly speaking, denotes not what is seen, but the process of seeing, should frequently have been over-looked: but it is much to be regretted that it has. If we are persuaded that King Lear is the bleakest of the tragedies, it is tempting for us to accept it as a testament of bleakness, taking ‘tragedy’ to be the denotation not simply of the artistic medium employed by Shakespeare in this play, but also of the quality of life he is describing. To do so is, of course, to confuse what is seen with the manner in which it is revealed, the object with the medium or filter through which it is viewed. It is more than forty years since Sisson attacked some of the cruder precipitations of this confusion, insisting that for criticism, ‘it is in the main a question of the artistic problems which Shakespeare set himself, not of the problems which life set Shakespeare’ (p. 24). That was well said, but unfortunately Sisson’s admiration of the tragedies led him to a conclusion in which there is a good deal more faith and speculation than objective assessment. The fact that tragedy has nearly always made the greatest theatrical impact tends to blind us to the fact that Shakespeare himself did not consistently regard it as the best medium for what he wanted to say, and that eventually he seems to have found tragic form too constricting, and perhaps even reductive.