Shakespearean Tragedy

Kiernan Ryan is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, and an Emeritus Fellow of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, UK.

Kiernan Ryan approaches Shakespearean tragedy like a visitor from the future, to reveal how these centuries-old plays still ‘dream on things to come’ through the politics of time. He shows how the lovers are crossed by stars dead for millennia; and why the light that breaks in their day is a dawn that hasn’t yet arrived. But we are the future Hamlet awaits, in Ryan’s time frame; Cordelia’s ‘smiles and tears’ are our cues for ‘a better way’. So, this is truly a world turned upside-down, where the hero counts the ‘hours, days, years’ before ‘desolation begins to make a better life’. In short, Shakespearean Tragedy gives us a master-class in ‘the revolution of the times’.

• Preface PART I1 The Birth of Shakespearean Tragedy: 2 & 3 Henry VI The Quondam King The Wild Morisco The Upstart Crow The Devil’s Butcher PART II2 Titus Andronicus: A Sympathy of Woe Prototypes and Precursors A Wilderness of Tigers This Fearful Slumber 3 Romeo and Juliet: Kissing by the Book Strange Love Grown Bold The Prison-House of Language Empowering the Audience 4 Julius Caesar: The Common Good An Icy Anatomy Scorning the Base Degrees The Foremost Man of All the World PART III5 Hamlet: A Kind of Fighting The Stamp of One Defect Seeing Doubles That Within Which Passes Show Things Rank and Gross in Nature The Whips and Scorns of Time The Strong Confluence of Contending Forces A King of Infinite Space The Prophetic Soul of the Wide World 6 Othello: Thereby Hangs a Tail Expectation in Preference to Surprise Sinking Below Shakespeare True Colours The Green-Eyed Monster Who Hath Done This Deed? The Tragedy of the Handkerchief If Wives Do Fall Motiveless Malignity and the Curse of Service What You Know, You Know A Pageant to Keep Us in False Gaze 7 King Lear: Shakespeare’s Leviathan A Play Fit for a King Echoes and Anticipations (i) Echoes and Anticipations (ii) A Better Where to Find The Whoreson and the Plague of Custom The Fool and the King The Art of Known and Feeling Sorrows The King and the Beggar So Distribution Should Undo Excess A Whole Dead World Galloping Over the Living Earth 8 Macbeth: The Habit of Another Nature Embracing the Butcher Supernatural Soliciting Terrestrial Tragedy The Language of Complicity Vaster Powers Without: Mirroring Macbeth So Much More the Man Dispossession and Disavowal Pity, Like a Naked New-Born Babe Blood Will Have Blood Ere Humane Stature Purged the Gentle Weal PART IV9 Antony and Cleopatra: Making Defect Perfection Tragedy Travestied The Nobleness of Life Past the Size of Dreaming: Utopian Realism A Lass Unparalleled 10 Coriolanus: A World Elsewhere Antecedents and Affinities An Inventory to Particularize Their Abundance To Unbuild the City and to Lay All Flat A Kind of Nothing Works Cited Index