Why Shakespeare remains the great playwright

William Shakespeare’s tragedies stand apart. Their impact is profound and lasting, in cultural, artistic, emotional and psychological terms. Who could forget the ghost’s first appearance in Hamlet, or Lear bearing the dead Cordelia?

No other dramatist has achieved what Shakespeare did: in subject matter, emotional heft, innovative usage of source material, character development and startling deployment of language Shakespeare is (and there is no other word for it) extraordinary. He surpasses both his predecessors (sorry, Thomas Kyd!) and those that came after him. He built on the foundations the classical playwrights established, and then, almost casually, bettered them, too.

Rhodri Lewis (who teaches at Princeton) discusses the tragedies’ overarching themes in Shakespeare’s Tragic Art: “more than merely coherent,” they effect a “deliberate and carefully elaborated design.” Lewis proposes his argument in a manner that’s appealing to a general reader (albeit one armed with some knowledge of the plays), yet also with scholarly precision and a smattering of dry wit: Lady Macbeth, for example, is “the gin” in Macbeth’s “tonic”; Hamlet idealizes his father as “dutiful, impersonal, oddly hygienic.”

Lewis’s book offers so many fresh insights and well-turned phrases that I had to buy a new notebook to fit them all in. I’d not noticed, for example, that when Hamlet stages a play (“The Murder of Gonzago”) to test his uncle’s guilty behavior, it’s the nephew who is shown murdering the king — to any observer at Elsinore, it seems as if Hamlet’s intentionally displaying a plot to kill Claudius. No wonder that usurping monarch rushes straight offstage. Similarly, it puts a different perspective on the Macbeths to note that they are the only happily married couple in all the tragedies. I guess there’s nothing like regicide to bring you together. And any book that quotes Iggy Pop’s venture into classical scholarship (a piece on Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) certainly gets my vote.

The ten tragedies are tackled in order of composition, which lends a satisfying structure to the book. Shakespeare composed them over a period of twenty years, beginning with Titus Andronicus in around 1590, and ending up with Coriolanus (c. 1605-08), thus straddling the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I, something we tend to forget, associating the playwright forever with the Virgin Queen. Lewis charts how Shakespeare moved from his early work in the showy, juvenile but nonetheless sporadically effective Titus, to the peerless masterpieces Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear, with “growing confidence” in his broad tragic vision. It’s this vision which Lewis anatomizes and explores, with great skill, clarity and brio.

Lewis, who has written previously about Hamlet, is deeply and thoughtfully immersed in the bard’s life and work: he reminds us how steeped Shakespeare would have been in the classics. Like any other grammar-school boy in Stratford-upon-Avon (or indeed, across England), he would have had to learn passages of Latin by heart, and would have undertaken many exercises in rhetoric, which enabled, Lewis points out, the development of a crucial part of his craft: the ability to make audiences “see” action when it’s being reported, though it’s happened offstage. Lewis also understands the business of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters, and how the playwright’s professional status depended “on turning out plays.” Art and commerce meet and shake hands.

Lewis’s Shakespeare is a living playwright, growing and changing, grappling with ideas and shaping them to form a unique — and startlingly modern — vision. Gone are the stiff unities and rules of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and in their place come contingency and indeterminacy. The world is ruled not by divinely ordained laws of necessity and fate; something as haphazard as an undelivered letter can cause the deaths of two young lovers, as in Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare is forever asking questions, and never quite giving us straightforward answers, in his attempts to show how we think and talk about the strange world in which we find ourselves, a theater watched by the gods. By showing us this process, Lewis delivers fascinating explorations of Shakespeare’s mind, intellectual background and world. It’s almost as if he had the chap accessible via Ouija board. Incidentally, this book should be thrust into the hands of any lurking Shakespeare conspiracists you may happen to know: after digesting it, it’s impossible for anyone to maintain that, say, the Earl of Oxford “really” wrote the plays. Shakespeare’s learning, experience and stagecraft are patently and obviously behind them, underpinning everything from rhetorical skill to plot.

Lewis’s reading of the plays is compelling: he argues that Shakespeare returns again and again to a central problem: how do people understand the world around them, and how do they use language to frame it? He begins at the beginning, with Titus. Where I, as an undergraduate, loved its weird flashiness (mostly for its sensational scenes, such as the one where Titus serves up the children of the Goth Queen to her in a pie), for Lewis Titus is a play that is “difficult to love.” He does, however, acknowledge its popularity at the time, and also that it contains, in “embryonic form,” a great deal that is estimable in the later plays. Being relatively new at his craft, in Titus Shakespeare deployed Latinate and elaborate language. But it wasn’t enough, and finding it unsuitable for his expanding purposes, he moved to the more domestic setting of Romeo and Juliet. This evolution allowed him to “create the illusion of a mind thinking through the challenges of its moment.”

One criticism often leveled at Shakespeare is that he’s always writing about kings, queens and socially elevated characters. How, in the dread phraseology of today, is that “relatable?” Lewis argues that even despite Hamlet’s obvious “privilege,” Shakespeare “continues his exploration of how it is to live with the first stirrings of a consciousness that one does not know who or what one is, as also with the suspicion that one’s cultural, spiritual and intellectual resources can do nothing to help.” We can all understand those feelings of unease as we try to make sense of things that might, in fact, be senseless. Similarly, both King Lear and Macbeth are about the lies we tell ourselves “in our desperation for things to make sense.”

These plays represent the height of Shakespeare’s tragic powers. But this forensic examination of human foibles was not easy, and took its toll. In Coriolanus, the playwright found an end to his tragic art: “appalled by the human condition,” writes Lewis, “his powers of imaginative sympathy” were overcome. It’s a deeply stirring image: the playwright, exhausted by his attempts to understand the world, lays down his tragic quill. Some suggest that, around the time of writing Coriolanus, Shakespeare had a kind of breakdown and turned to writing the later romances like The Tempest, with their focus on family and regeneration.

Shakespeare’s tragedies, argues Lewis, show us that we are all deluded, stumbling about in a complex world that we cannot hope to grasp fully. His tragic heroes, unlike those of the ancients, don’t achieve moments of self-knowledge at the end of the plays. This is because Shakespeare was aware that the construction of the self is a continual process: there’s nothing “stable” to discover. “As nothing other than death is inevitable, tragedies should not pretend otherwise,” Lewis writes. A bleak vision indeed, but a resonant one.

We shouldn’t, though, feel despair at this. The language of literary criticism has entered into public consciousness: Aristotle’s theory that tragedy should be “cathartic” has led to the most mundane kinds of experience being called cathartic. For Lewis, it has a deeper meaning: not a purging (or healing) of the emotions of pity and fear, but a clarification. Shakespeare wants us “not only to see ourselves, but to see the ways in which we see ourselves.” Far from being straightforwardly didactic, his desire is, through tragedy, to make us think. What is language? What are words? And how can we ever know anything, when most of the time we’re just making it up as we go along?

Lewis makes a powerful case for Shakespeare’s unique, many-faceted tragic worldview, and his book is a compelling piece of literary criticism. What’s more, it sent me rushing straight back to my Complete Shakespeare, with a burning desire to enter its glittering, vast worlds anew.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 2024 World edition.