The Theory of Greek Tragedy 9 
In short, Shakespeare’s tragedy, like romantic tragedy in gen- 
eral, is a tragedy of circumstances ; hence the “ low” and “ comic” 
--elements with which pseudo-classicism used to reproach it. To 
regard a business like the graveyard scene in Hamlet as a side 
issue or a sop to the groundlings, as apologetic criticism was once 
fond of doing, is to miss the point. There may be some excuse 
for disliking it when done, but Shakespeare knew what he was 
about when he did it. In its violent affront to the ideal dignity 
of Hamlet’s situation at the moment when he is tottering pre- 
cariously on the edge of his own grave as of Ophelia’s, in its fan- 
tastic contradiction of the Hamlet of abstraction by the Hamlet 
of fatuity it is of the very essence of Shakespearean tragedy. The 
objection that such a scene is out of keeping with the seriousness 
of the emergency is true enough; but it is equally pointless, for 
the tragedy consists in just this affront to human dignity, this out- 
rage to the sacredness of the individual. That such an objection 
should ever have been made, argues a gross misunderstanding, not 
only of the manner in which he conceived the tragic problem but 
also of the nature of his tragic irony, so different from Sophocles’. 
“That is the glory of Shakespeare,’ Tennyson is reported to have 
said, “that he can give you the incongruity of things.” Even 
about his comic characters in their more sober aspects hangs the 
atmosphere of fortuitous calamity. It is what gives Falstaff his 
grip upon our sympathies; he ought, it seems, to be so much 
nobler than he is. For Shakespeare’s mixture of comic and 
tragic is not confined to a mere intermingling of scenes of one 
sort with those of another; it resides in a kind of duplicity of con- 
ception, which is, perhaps, humorous rather than comic. Just as 
the lighter characters like Falstaff may catch a reflection of pathos 
from being in some manner the victims of untoward circumstances, 
so his tragic characters too may be slightly ridiculous for the same 
reason, like Othello gulping lago’s inuendoes or Macbeth gaping 
at the witches. At all events, from the nature of the case his 
tragic heroes, for all their wilfulness and violence, are always a 
little pitiable as well as pathetic, like poor old Lear. About them 
all is a little something of Coleridge—one reason, perhaps, that he 
is able to speak of them with so much intelligence and sympathy. 
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