Shakespeare and Tragedy in Light of Easter

In the preface to Dorothy Sayers' excellent play series about the life of Jesus, The Man Born To Be King, Sayers describes how the Gospels' account of Jesus' life can be taken as a tragedy leading to his death — until, with his rising from the dead, it abruptly turns around.  Now, it's (in the Aristotelian sense) a comedy:  it has a happy and joyful ending.  I agree with her analysis here wholeheartedly.

"In light of this fact," she continues, "the interesting question arises whether such a thing as a Christian tragedy is possible."  Even though Christianity says humans are by nature condemned to destruction or disharmony — we are redeemable, for God loves us and sent Jesus to redeem us.

She does give one exception - "Short of damnation, it seems, there can be no Christian tragedy."  Marlowe's Faust, she says, chose that only clearly-tragic subject.  But "no tragedy of Shakespeare possesses a definite Christian theology, or even a well-defined Christian atmosphere".

Dorothy Sayers at the Detection Club, a club she founded for her fellow mystery writers 

There's a lot that I could talk about in Sayers' preface here, but for Easter this year, I'd like to talk about what she says on Shakespeare and tragedy.

While I hesitate to contradict Sayers - who, in addition to writing great plays herself, was also an accomplished literary scholar - it seems to me that she neglects what Shakespeare actually does do in his tragedies.  While he doesn't write "a definite Christian theology," at least some of his tragedies are compatible with a Christian way of looking at the world, and one of them - Hamlet - explicitly references parts of it.

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The core of a Shakespearean tragedy (as I dug into in another post) is that the protagonist is put in just the wrong plot, which plays on a failing of his - his tragic flaw - to bring him down to disaster.  He falls to disaster through the circumstances around him, but also through his individual choices.

In Macbeth, the plot starts when Macbeth meets the three witches who promise him that he'll be king of Scotland.  Shakespeare's audience would have immediately taken these witches to be evilly tempting Macbeth to do evil.  This's just what the witches do, and Macbeth and his wife choose to take up their invitation to evil and kill King Duncan. It isn't fate or circumstances that bring them to murder; it's their choice.

Macbeth, Banquo and the witches on the heath (painted by Henry Fuseli, 1793)

Macbeth and his wife both show sorrow over murdering Duncan - his wife, to the point of obsession — but they never repent of it.  Instead, they try their hardest to protect the throne they've wrongfully gained.  Macbeth goes on to murder again, and to inquire of the witches again about how to protect his throne.  He gets an apparent promise of safety... but as he realizes too late, it's a trick.  Yet even then, he doesn't even start to change himself:

I will not yield
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet
And to be baited with the rabble’s curse.
Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries “Hold! Enough!

This can easily be read as a Christian tragedy.  It doesn't demand that reading; plenty of secular scholars have written about Macbeth and his wife's psychology.  But with that reading, we see the pair falling into sin by a free choice and then sorrowing over its effects but refusing to actually repent.

And, in Christian theology, "damned" is exactly where Macbeth seems to be going.  Sayers suggested that Faust - where the eponymous protagonist is damned to Hell in the end - tells the only plot possible for a Christian tragedy.  Macbeth implies that same plot.  But unlike Marlowe, Shakespeare explores his protagonists' psychology on the earlier stages of that road.

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Hamlet begins (after teasing hints) with Hamlet talking with his father's ghost, who charges him to avenge his death (at Hamlet's uncle's hands).  Such vengeance isn't particularly Christian behavior, but in Shakespeare's day it would be taken as Hamlet's duty as rightful king.  In Shakespeare's day as in ours, this isn't an unusual sort of ghost story.  This particular ghost clearly states he's in Purgatory, with a description that would've been familiar to Shakespeare's audience:  

"confined to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away."

And then, Hamlet delays.  He refuses to kill his uncle while the uncle is praying, since he wishes him to die in sin.  This moment is when things start going wrong for Hamlet.  He kills Polonius, and then his uncle sends him away with sealed orders to have him killed.

But, by a coincidental pirate attack, Hamlet is saved and returns home safe.  This coincidence has convinced him that "There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will."

Hamlet contemplates his mortality, holding Yorick’s skull (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2008)

Yet still he delays, unwilling to continue down the bloody course he's started.  He regrets his murder of Polonius, at least, if he shrugs away his sending his friends Guildenstern and Rosencrantz to their deaths.   The final confrontation is brought on not by his action but by a challenge to him, and then a sword which someone else has poisoned.

At the end, Horatio speaks to Hamlet's dead body "Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest".  It would be debatable how a theologian might interpret Hamlet's eventual fate - but for all Hamlet's faults, I think Shakespeare wants us to join in Horatio's wish.

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But in both these plays, notice, I'm reading into the plays what happens on a larger scale.  Shakespeare is focusing on Macbeth and Hamlet's psychology and their relations with others while on Earth, not on their souls and what happens to them after they die.  He and his audience - all Christians - would doubtlessly have considered it, but it wasn't their emphasis.

So the secret of a Christian tragedy - if you don't want to tell the story of Marlowe's Faust - is to cut it off early, to focus on what goes on in this world.  Even if Hamlet reaches salvation in the end, there's blood and tribulation around his corpse if we keep the stage there.

As Sayers says in the same preface, even the story of Jesus would make a good tragedy if it had ended at his death.  I, sharing Sayers' Christian faith, agree and would go further - it wouldn't be wrong to cut it off like that and regard the shortened story as a tragedy; there was a lot of tragedy there.  It was on a smaller scale than the triumph of his resurrection and the salvation he brings, but still very real.  The this-worldly tragedies Shakespeare writes are on a smaller scale than that, but they're also valid to consider as tragedies.

Sayers was personally aware of such smaller-scale tragedies.  She herself was writing this from inside an unhappy marriage to an alcoholic husband who was jealous of her literary success, which had almost driven her to divorce in an era where that was social anathema.  But still, from this vantage, she questioned whether a Christian tragedy was possible.

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My answer - and I think Sayers' as well - is that, in a Christian worldview, all tragedy short of ultimate damnation turns into a happy ending in the end.  Hamlet and everyone (save Horatio) onstage around him can die, but death itself is temporary.

This is how Sayers could call her version of Faust (The Devil To Pay) a "comedy":  in her version, despite all the tragedy that happens in the meantime, Faust in the end finds salvation.

This is also how the New Testament writers themselves tell Christians to regard their tragedies:  after 1 Peter 1 speaks of "salvation ready to be revealed," the writer continues, "In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials."  This would apply just as well to Sayers, to Shakespeare's characters (and Shakespeare himself, given his son's death), and every other Christian.

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But in the meantime - "now for a little while", as Peter puts it - there are stories of tragedy to be told.  To the Christian (such as myself) they may well be viewed in a different light as they can ultimately lead to a joyful ending.

"I am more an antique Roman than a Dane," Horatio says near the end, reflecting on the tragic deaths - and there is indeed a great difference between those two.  But the tragedy was set in Christian Denmark, and staged in Christian England.