8 PH. Frye 
bases alone. I have assumed the dramatic genre with all its ap- 
purtenances and properties. And I have taken for granted as 
sufficiently obvious of itself that the rational premises of tragedy 
are expressed and to a certain extent conceived in terms of sensa- 
tion and emotion. The kind of story in which the problem is 
sensibly embodied and through which the tragic qualm is emotion- 
ally communicated, together with the manner of treatment 
whereby the solution is intimated, will depend upon the character 
of the drama and its inspiration. Naturally too the specific feel- 
ings to which the tragic qualm is determined, will vary with the 
dramatist’s sense of the tragic problem—as will the pacification 
with his convictions religious or otherwise—as these may be 
affected by his natural disposition and the civilization in which he 
finds himself. If the tragic problem of Shakespeare and the Eliz- 
abethans is compared with that of Sophocles and the Athenians, 
it will be found to arise from quite another notion of the fatal 
incongruities of life and to be differently constituted with respect 
to its emotional notes, while the solutions tacitly proposed by the 
two dramas will naturally diverge to an equal extent. 
With Shakespeare the tragic dissonance or “clash” would 
seem to engage as between man’s possibilities or pretensions and 
his fate. The incompatibility of his desires and aspirations, which 
are illimitable, with the conditions which actually dispose of him— 
mean, trivial, absurd, belittling as they may be, but always at 
odds with his higher nature and impulses and frequently ruinous 
of his life and happiness—something like this would appear to be 
what moved Shakespeare most in his graver moods. The contrast 
between what humanity might or should be and what as a matter 
of fact it may become by the accidents of existence—herein lies 
the discord at the root of his tragedy. A being of inexhaustible 
capacity, noble in reason, infinite in faculty, godlike in apprehen- 
sion, reduced to a mere quintessence of dust—a Hamlet whose 
world is out of joint or an Othello “ fall’n in the practice of a 
damned slave,”’ such is the Shakespearean protagonist. 
This man so great that all that is, is his, 
Oh, what a trifle and poor thing he is! 
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