This study focuses on Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, the four main tragedies and Antony and Cleopatra. Tom McAlindon argues that there were two models of nature in Renaissance culture, one hierarchical, in which everything has an appointed place, and the other contrarious, showing nature as a tense system of interacting opposites, liable to sudden collapse and transformation. This latter model informs Shakespeare's tragedy.

Since about 1960, when five-act division in Shakespeare's plays was strongly disputed, most critics have focused on individual scenes rather than holistic form. This book argues for Shakespeare's use of five acts, arranged in three cycles to form a 2-1-2 pattern. It also examines the role of multiple plots and centers of consciousness, especially in the festive comedies and romances. Additionally, it traces Shakespeare's gradual mastery of the art of epiphany, compares it to Spenser's complementary focus on transcendent reality, and traces in Macbeth the dark mode of Shakespeare's dramaturgical pattern.

A "symbolist" approach has dominated Shakespearean criticism for many years, but Ruth Nevo believes that the emphasis on static and pictorial aspects has obscured the essentially dynamic nature of dramatic expression and this study of the development of Shakespeare's tragic form is offered to correct the imbalance. From detailed analyses of each of Shakespeare's ten tragedies emerges a characteristic structure—a five-phased movement of discovery—that articulates and orders the traditional components of tragedy. This sequence is one of predicament, psychomachia, peripeteia, perspectives of irony and pathos, and catastrophe. It is a continuous, accumulative, and consummatory one, rather than a simple up-down movement or even a more complex thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Inheriting a five-act model and its developed rationale, Shakespeare used it to express an ever richer and more complex tragic experience. As the protagonist's life unfolds before us, the development of his tragic recognition is coextensive with the whole of the action. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

First published in 1972. The emphasis of this book is that each of Shakespeare's tragedies demanded its own individual form and that although certain themes run through most of the tragedies, nearly all critics refrain from the attempt to apply external rules to them. The plays are almost always concerned with one person; they end with the death of the hero; the suffering and calamity that befall him are exceptional; and the tragedies include the medieval idea of the reversal of fortune.

Readers of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies have long noted the absence of readily explainable motivations for some of Shakespeare’s greatest characters: why does Hamlet delay his revenge for so long? Why does King Lear choose to renounce his power? Why is Othello so vulnerable to Iago’s malice? But while many critics have chosen to overlook these omissions or explain them away, Millicent Bell demonstrates that they are essential elements of Shakespeare’s philosophy of doubt. Examining the major tragedies, Millicent Bell reveals the persistent strain of philosophical skepticism. Like his contemporary, Montaigne, Shakespeare repeatedly calls attention to the essential unknowability of our world. In a period of social, political, and religious upheaval, uncertainty hovered over matters great and small—the succession of the crown, the death of loved ones from plague, the failure of a harvest. Tumultuous social conditions raised ultimate questions for Shakespeare, Bell argues, and ultimately provoked in him a skepticism which casts shadows of existential doubt over his greatest masterpieces.

Every generation develops its own approach to tragedy, attitudes successively influenced by such classic works as A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy and the studies in interpretation by G. Wilson Knight. A comprehensive new book on the subject by an author of the same calibre was long overdue. In his book, originally published in 1981, John Bayley discusses the Roman plays, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens as well as the four major tragedies. He shows how Shakespeare’s most successful tragic effects hinge on an opposition between the discourses of character and form, role and context. For example, in Lear the dramatis personae act in the dramatic world of tragedy which demands universality and high rhetoric of them. Yet they are human and have their being in the prosaic world of domesticity and plain speaking. The inevitable intrusion of the human world into the world of tragedy creates the play’s powerful off-key effects. Similarly, the existential crisis in Macbeth can be understood in terms of the tension between accomplished action and the free-ranging domain of consciousness. What is the relation between being and acting? How does an audience become intimate with a protagonist who is alienated from his own play? What did Shakespeare add to the form and traditions of tragedy? Do his masterpieces in the genre disturb and transform it in unexpected ways? These are the issues raised by this lucid and imaginative study. Professor Bayley’s highly original rethinking of the problems will be a challenge to the Shakespearean scholar as well as an illumination to the general reader.

This volume details features of Shakespeare's tragedies.