Shakespeare's Tragic Art - by Rhodri Lewis (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In this book Rhodri Lewis argues that Shakespeare's tragedies are a series of experiments that attempt to tell the truth about the world as Shakespeare sees it, and to discover how far he can stretch tragic affirmation to accommodate the darker aspects of this vision. Lewis argues that Shakespeare worked hard to develop an understanding of what tragedy might be good for; that this understanding emerged from his engagement with the traditions of tragic writing and theorizing that had gone before him; that he used this understanding to shape his tragic plays as carefully patterned aesthetic wholes; and that Shakespeare's understanding of the tragic has "as little to do with Hegel as it does with the unities of tragic time, place, and action that many of Shakespeare's peers and successors busied themselves abstracting from Aristotle's Poetics." Lewis begins the book by tracing the ideas and practices of tragedy as they were known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the sixteenth century. He then takes a chronological approach to Shakespeare's plays, ultimately seeking to affirm the status of dramatic art in Shakespeare's time as a medium for telling the truth about the human experience in a world that is not fully susceptible to rational analysis"--

Book Synopsis

A new account of Shakespearean tragedy as a response to life in an uncertain world

In Shakespeare's Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis offers a powerfully original reassessment of tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it--of what drew him toward tragic drama, what makes his tragedies distinctive, and why they matter.

After reconstructing tragic theory and practice as Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew them, Lewis considers in detail each of Shakespeare's tragedies from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus. He argues that these plays are a series of experiments whose greatness lies in their author's nerve-straining determination to represent the experience of living in a world that eludes rational analysis. They explore not just our inability to know ourselves as we would like to, but the compensatory and generally unacknowledged fictions to which we bind ourselves in our hunger for meaning--from the political, philosophical, social, and religious to the racial, sexual, personal, and familial. Lewis's Shakespeare not only creates tragedies that exceed those written before them. Through his art, he also affirms and invigorates the kinds of knowing that are available to intelligent animals like us.

A major reevaluation of Shakespeare's tragedies, Shakespeare's Tragic Art is essential reading for anyone interested in Shakespeare, tragedy, or the capacity of literature to help us navigate the perplexities of the human condition.

Review Quotes

"As cogent an account as I have seen of how the unique qualities of Shakespeare's tragic characters, qualities which have often been treated as presciently modern in other studies, emerged out of early modern intellectual culture writ large. . . .Terrific."---Curtis Perry, Review of English Studies

"An impressive display of scholarship. . . .[Lewis's] targets are the ideas to which these characters adhere and the delusion that they can be authors of their own destinies. In the confinement of his characters, we recognise our own confinement too."---Adrian Poole, Literary Review

"While keeping one foot firmly in historicism, [Lewis] also connects the tragedies to the modern sensibility that understands the human individual as observer and observed, both subject and object of the constructions of art. . . . Heidegger's Weltbild here rubs shoulders with the Renaissance's heritage of verba (words) and res (things). The resulting analysis is sharp, engaging, and surprisingly readable."-- "Choice Reviews"

"Provocative, stimulating . . . Lewis ends by commending the freedom of interpretation that Shakespeare allows us, a freedom that entails a willingness to be open to his disturbance of our unthinking complacency."---Paul Dean, New Criterion

"The best volume on the Bard I have read since Emma Smith's This Is Shakespeare. . . . A valuable critical work that sees the Bard as a 'temperamental skepticist' whose mission is more diagnostic than it is didactic: this Shakespeare is of particular use in our current addiction to the blind alleys of dogma."---Bill Marx, Arts Fuse

"A New Yorker Best Book We've Read This Year"

"Shakespeare's Tragic Art is an important addition to the literature about Shakespearean tragedy and essential reading for those interested in the subject. It is more than that, however - it offers an insight into a way of understanding those mysteries of human existence that Shakespeare had some understanding of and passed on to us through his tragic dramas."---Ralph Goldswain, No Sweat Shakespeare

"Taking on an analysis of what Shakespeare was attempting to achieve with his run of 10 tragedies requires not just a knowledge of the plays and the theories and speculations of all those critics and commentators who went before but also a robust hypothesis that brings something new to the table. Rhodri Lewis. . .manages to pull off this herculean task with some aplomb. . . . This book is a must for anyone interested in studying Shakespeare in any depth."---Terry Potter, The Letterpress Project

"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"---Philip Womack, The Spectator World

"This engaging study . . . finds common threads in the plays' inner workings, most notably a delicate, calculated interplay between plot and personality."-- "New Yorker"

"Ambitious and intriguing. . . . An erudite and scholarly exploration of the Bard's work."-- "Kirkus Reviews"

About the Author

Rhodri Lewis teaches English at Princeton University. His previous books include Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton) and Language, Mind, and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke.