Three papers on Tragedy

Communications of the University of South Africa

This is a brief paper covering three tragedies.
There was no ISBN number assigned to this work. 

The following three essays are included in the book

1. The Jacobean Anguish
2. The Meaning of King Lear
3. Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Tragedy.

Extract from the first paper:

'It was Stendhal who first made a literary point of the theory that an artist is truly appreciated only by an age for which his work holds a special significance, for which it is real, a part of experience. That this is true may be seen in the fact that so many writers owe their ultimate fame to discovery or rediscovery by a public far removed from them in time and manners. Stendhal is a case in point: when he said that his work would be appreciated only after eighty years, he was almost exactly right. And Donne and Pascal are similar cases.

For us of the twentieth century the Jacobeans have a peculiar attraction, one which arises principally from the similarity of the conditions in which we live to those of the earlier seventeenth century. The sense of restlessness, of insecurity and disgust of life upon which their greatest work was bu'.lt is no strange sense to us today who live it and live with it, and are constantly being kept in mind of it by our foremost writers and artists. Our world, no less - and perhaps no more - than theirs, is a sick one; sick because bewildered by a disintegration with which it cannot cope, which it cannot understand although already aware of it. Bewilderment in itself is not harmful; may, indeed be beneficial; but when it is intensified beyond a certain degree it is almost certain to bring about an unbalance comparable with that achieved by Pavlov in his experiments with conditioned reflexes, on unbalance succeeded by break-down ·and neuroses. An age which can go so far along the path of contemporary writers and artists as to produce the nightmares of Kafka, a philosophical system such as that of Jean-Paul Sartre, or a cynicism in its treatment of human bodies and minds such as is general in our time, would have appealed to the conventionally Machiavellian in the Jacobeans. For much the same reasons, principally perhaps because they were less squeamish and less uncomfortably-conscience than us, the Jacobeans come close to our hearts. It is not entirely without reason that The Duchess of Malfi was put on and had a long run in one of the great London theatres shortly after the war. It is not for nothing that T. S. Eliot, possibly our foremost analyst of Weltschmerz and our foremost poet, should be deeply interested in the period and very much influenced by it in his own work. Bosola's lines are, indeed, because we can feel them at first-hand and apply them with full awareness, the key for us to ·a study of the Jacobean drama in general, and particularly to the comprehension of individual dramatists, their outlook and their expression of it.'