Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by A. C. (Andrew Cecil) Bradley
page 51 of 619 (08%)
page 51 of 619 (08%)
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with anxiety. On the other hand, if the play opens with a quiet
conversation, this is usually brief, and then at once the hero enters and takes action of some decided kind. Nothing, for example, can be less like the beginning of _Macbeth_ than that of _King Lear_. The tone is pitched so low that the conversation between Kent, Gloster, and Edmund is written in prose. But at the thirty-fourth line it is broken off by the entrance of Lear and his court, and without delay the King proceeds to his fatal division of the kingdom. This tragedy illustrates another practice of Shakespeare's. _King Lear_ has a secondary plot, that which concerns Gloster and his two sons. To make the beginning of this plot quite clear, and to mark it off from the main action, Shakespeare gives it a separate exposition. The great scene of the division of Britain and the rejection of Cordelia and Kent is followed by the second scene, in which Gloster and his two sons appear alone, and the beginning of Edmund's design is disclosed. In _Hamlet_, though the plot is single, there is a little group of characters possessing a certain independent interest,--Polonius, his son, and his daughter; and so the third scene is devoted wholly to them. And again, in _Othello_, since Roderigo is to occupy a peculiar position almost throughout the action, he is introduced at once, alone with Iago, and his position is explained before the other characters are allowed to appear. But why should Iago open the play? Or, if this seems too presumptuous a question, let us put it in the form, What is the effect of his opening the play? It is that we receive at the very outset a strong impression of the force which is to prove fatal to the hero's happiness, so that, when we see the hero himself, the shadow of fate already rests upon him. And an effect of this kind is to be noticed in other tragedies. We are |
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