Originally posted: November 18, 2020
Chewing on Shakespeare is an activity of some literary critics even if they are not Shakespeare experts. It is like the mathematicians who took up Fermat's Last Theorem before it was solved. It was a way to test one’s powers against the best. What I found in dealing with my own Mt. Everest is that I had to understand or maybe finally come to understand that to explain Shakespeare I had to add melodrama as a fully realized genre of literature, along with tragedy and comedy, rather than a debased version of a genre limited for the popular arts that arrived with the Romantics. It was, to me, a revelation.
The great works of Shakespeare from Julius Caesar to Antony and Cleopatra (with the obvious exception of Twelfth Night) have been largely understood as tragedies, either of what Auden would call the Christian variety, in which case we understand the central characters as suffering from a fatal flaw which dooms those around them as well as themselves, or as tragedies of the Classic variety, in which case we understand the central characters as caught up in existential situations beyond their control, those including the warp and woof of nature, social relations, and the emotions of jealousy and ambition to which all people are subject, not just the tainted few. That construction of the plays is certainly true enough and, following Aristotle, in both cases people are shown as pushed beyond endurance so that they emerge scourged of pity and terror, justly having become aware of their own human, social and metaphysical limitations, the audience morally improved for having observed and grasped and engaged in these lives.
There is another way to look at this set of great works. Rather than looking at the plays as tragedies, these plays can be considered melodramas. That term need not be treated as a designation of something less than a tragedy, a tragedy manqué, in which the playwright has either not fully developed the tragic nature of his characters or where the playwright settled for placing characters in social situations where they go on too long about what are, after all, the relatively trivial travails of life, and generally exhibit their less than noble characters. The distinction between melodrama and tragedy is not so easily drawn. Lear goes on rather long windedly and his problems are indeed the social problems that are created by an old man coming to live with his relatives. Why does he have to keep all those knights with him in his daughter’s castle? He just has the pathetic conceptions of past grandeur that may descend on any old person. That is no reason to go off to the heath and bemoan his fate. Get a grip on yourself and get thee off to a nursing home.
The argument can also be reversed. A dramatic work that is clearly a melodrama because it has overdrawn emotions, overextended suspense and people notable for their weaknesses rather than their strengths, can bear the weight of a more tragic interpretation. Becoming attracted to the wrong person who gets you involved in a murder, as that happens in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, would seem pure melodrama. And yet Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff is doomed by his cynicism as much as by Barbara Stanwyck’s allure, his descent into murder worthy of consideration as tragedy. He was not cynical enough, and that is a trait that is all too human, all too general, and applicable in all times and places. His cynicism narrowed him as a human being even as it narrowed his ability to notice his own vulnerability. And Walter Neff did have strengths that could have been put to greater advantage. He was glib, intelligent, and resourceful. Edward G. Robinson, playing Neff’s boss, is correct to consider Neff’s downfall a cause of sorrow rather than of rejoicing. Fortinbras also takes the role of someone who sums up the fall of someone who had the capacity for greatness but muffed it. So the inferiority of melodrama to tragedy may simply be only that it is not superlative drama, inferior to tragedy only in that its heroes are lesser people than Shakespeare’s kings, and that the dramatic execution is not as grand as it is in Shakespeare, rather than in the fact that melodrama operates on lesser principles.
Try a different tack. Melodrama exists simultaneously with tragedy. When a play is looked at as a tragedy, it is considered for the ways it goes beyond pity and terror; when it is looked at as a melodrama, it is considered for the ways it does not go beyond pity and terror, but rather wallows in them, the audience asked to consider how much of these baleful emotions it can endure without withdrawing engagement from the play, finding a way to distance oneself from the play by noting, for example, that MacMurray should have sized up Stanwyck right away as a woman to run away from, or that the plan to murder her husband had too much room for things to go wrong, something Wilder passed over because he wanted to get to his point that the lovers would turn on one another. Looking at Shakespeare’s greatest dramas is therefore a kind of test in which the audience finds out how much it can endure, just as teenagers test themselves when they go to horror movies, something Shakespeare had tried out as early as Titus Andronicus, and yet, by the time of the great dramas, the emotions are so rich, so compelling, that in enduring these emotions the audience learns so much more about what those emotions are, jealousy and ambition and the rest, previously understood only in much more petty ways, and in that too there is a moral lesson.
Deeply engaging in dreary and dreadful emotions rather than somehow overcoming them explains why an audience of “groundlings” would be able to engage high tragedy: they would need only dip into or consider while their major investment and attention is on the pathos of people defeated because what they want is so wrong or outrageous and because they have so twisted themselves to get it as well as because of how often their defeats are repeated, as if the protagonists of these dramas were so many cases of obsessive compulsive behavior, continuing to knock their heads against the wall not so as to split them, as in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, but because doing so is how they understand their lives and how one or another part of the audience understands one or another part of its own.
Understanding Shakespeare’s greatest dramas as melodramas sheds light on how melodramatic dramaturgy sometimes, in these works, takes precedence over a strict adherence to a formula for tragedy. Looking at Hamlet, for example, as melodrama, helps, at the least, untangle some of the play’s narrative problems. These are not the ones summed up in T. S. Eliot’s phrase “the objective correlative”, which is a reference to the fact that there are not enough events to backup or supply substance for Hamlet’s practice of tacking back and forth in his behavior. There are plenty of psychological behavioral correlates to explain both Hamlet and the people who surround him. Hamlet has to mind his manners because he does not know who his enemies are and how many of them reside in his soul and how many reside outside him in other people. Polonius juggles platitudes so as to juggle his relation to the newly seated king as a prime advisor with his concern about his daughter carrying on with the son of the king who had recently died. Does the change of kings make the situation more or less fraught? No wonder he sends his son out of the country, lest Laertes be killed on some pretext or just because he becomes caught up in the general breakdown in which the country is engaged—which is, of course, what happens.
Rather, the problem with Hamlet is that we look for central dramatic moments that set the action underway and where crucial choices are made, and come to recognize that any of a number of moments will qualify, and so none satisfy. Hamlet thinks the Ghost set him on his way, though we know beforehand that he thinks politics and culture in Denmark are rank and that he has motive to feel in competition with Claudius, his motives known to him and given to us indirectly through his inappropriately passionate talk about both his mother and his girlfriend and his anger against Polonius and some of his old friends, Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern, who had not committed such a great crime when they kept Claudius informed about what Hamlet’s prickly and tempestuous personality was up to; it is what good friends would do for a friend who had gotten into deep waters. Hamlet grasps onto the Ghost as an excuse for his indignation, as he will move on to other excuses, such as when he withdraws from killing Claudius while the king is at prayer, presumably out of respect for a church whose doctrines he does not describe though which he does echo, in his secular way. Hamlet has a Christian sense of guilt and sinfulness and what can only be called anticipatory remorse.
As a tragedy, or even as a revenge tragedy gone wrong in that Hamlet betrays what a protagonist is supposed to do in a revenge play, there is the set up, where Hamlet is shown to be caught up in a usurpation of power, nudged along in his awareness by the Ghost of his father, and then there is the body of the play, where Hamlet plans various stratagems, such as confronting his mother, or thinking about killing the King, and then planning the play within a play as his final proof of the King’s guilt, all of these going wrong, and then Hamlet is distracted by Ophelia’s death, after his own disappearance from the scene, the plot unraveling, looking for a way to end, and, finally, beaten to whatever renewed attack on the King he might contemplate by the King’s own plot to finally get him out of the way by having him killed in what is ostensibly a friendly duel, however deep are the passions that underlie that duel. So even though there is much meandering, the message of the tragedy of Hamlet is that passions run deep and burst through, as they did with his mother and against Polonius, and it doesn’t much matter how the fickle finger of fate finally decides to resolve a conflict that has gone on too long. It is a tragedy because the warring facets of Hamlet’s character, those that mirror the possibilities of the modern individual, full of moral fury and dangerous inwardness, struggle against one another as well as the circumstances of his place in his family and at court that bind him.
The melodramatic trajectory of the play is different. Hamlet is put to brood, for reasons that are unclear, by his father’s death and the succession of his uncle to the throne, the audience led to suspect some kind of adolescent breakdown caused by an over concern with his mother’s sex life and his own ambivalence towards women as that is seen in his relation with Ophelia, a woman who he disdains for having granted him her favors. Yes, he might rankle over a wedding so soon after a funeral, but given the ways of politics, that successions need to be clearly established, it is no reason to take deep affront. Instead, Hamlet rants and whines and nevertheless finds excuses for not killing the king because to do so would be to finally have to face the grown up consequences of the malarkey he has been mouthing. All he can do is act the impresario and imagine that the play within the play settles anything other than providing another opportunity to express his over the top emotions. This flawed rather than tragic protagonist settles down, leaves the country, returns, offers soliloquies about death, as would be expected from someone too long an adolescent, and then is killed in a duel that is something of an afterthought in that it is not an outcome of the rest of the plot but an event that may be, if anything, a way to reintroduce him to the court whose legitimacy he now accepts.
Hamlet also betrays a need for the play within the play to prove what he supposedly already knew, which is to make the same mistake Michael Corleone made when, early in his career as Don, he insisted on a confession before killing someone who betrayed him. He did not trust his judgment as of yet. Hamlet also insists on insulting Ophelia for her sexuality, which is not a nice way to treat a girl who had bestowed her favors, after all, on him. Hamlet is always flailing about, displaying a jejeune sense of the world that seems so right only from the inside, and that, we realize upon contemplation, he also senses to be the case, as does everyone around him, who give him a wide berth, and with good reason. Hamlet had not offered an excuse for nor needed more information before killing Polonius, nor is he punished for that event. He is a madman who moves from one debacle to another. It must have been a difficult moment, seeing what he could do when he let himself get out of hand, and he was not going to repeat it, playing it safe, reading the situation as safe, even when he is challenged to a duel by someone whose father he had killed, as if the rules of chivalry would protect him.
Hamlet is maddeningly difficult a personality, wallowing in his self pity, moving from one maladroit moment to the next, spurred on by his self-loathing as well as by an education which should have made him aware that politics goes on as usual despite personal grief and personal issues. How long do we have to put up, make amends for, and repair the damage done by this suddenly ungainly late adolescent? It is all an embarrassment that calls for much too much forbearance. Why put up with the psycho? How much of this is the audience able or willing to endure in this very long play?
It is Claudius, at the end, then, who has overdone things. There is, by the end, no longer any reason to kill Hamlet except in that it reveals the malevolence that Hamlet had expected all along. Getting his Queen killed in the process is just another pathetic and laughable element of an overly convoluted plot against Hamlet that is so sadly conceived and badly executed that it succeeds only in removing the entire court from the scene—and for what? Nothing accomplished except the expression of over the top sentiments, all engendered by Hamlet’s own original over the top distaste for the succession of Claudius to the kingship. Melodramas can take any number of twists and turns, as we know from watching soap operas, but tragedies have to remain true to their arc, as Racine knew, who therefore succeeded in writing extremely boring and unenlightened plays because he imagined the tragic arc, the moral it would tell, before rethinking the intricacy of the story for its own sake.
If that is the case, that Hamlet is merely a melodrama, why does it, even in those terms, have such a hold on the western imagination? Erasmus had, nearly a century before, discussed the nature of the modern kingship. A king was no longer to be primarily a warrior. Rather, he was to be primarily a statesman. That meant he had mastered statecraft well enough to keep out of unnecessary wars, and was also, to use the modern terminology, the chief policy maker for the nation in economic and social matters. That new idea was well represented by Elizabeth I, who presided over the elaboration of an English royal bureaucracy that, in her reign, was becoming broad ranging enough to be considered a modern government. Which is not to speak of her constructing a new religion, rather than, as her father had done, merely creating one, nor is it to speak of her having decided how to deal with Spain, first by tempting it, then by harassing it, and then, when there was no alternative, defending England against it. Hamlet, on the other hand, deals with Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern as a Machiavellian would rather than as a statesman would. Nor does Hamlet consult with Claudius about how to move the state forward through making a show of unity, however falsely felt. Rather, he is an inveterate schemer and betrayer, and so a bit of a throwback to what a king or a prince was in pre-modern times, even if he had been trained at Wittenberg and so could have been expected to know better.
Hamlet had turned his sophisticated education in a different direction when he brought it with him to a backward kingdom. What he had brought with him was the modern perception of the self as a place of secrets kept from oneself as well as others, and a brooding presence most concerned with keeping his motives and his psychological evolution to himself. The motivation for this royal fellow is his internality rather than his service to the state. Harold Bloom is correct in seeing Shakespeare as a transition into the modern world where that new entity, the individual, is at war with his society. Hamlet dies because the stage is not yet set for such a king or such a man and that is sad, a man caught out of his time that would be acceptable in a more modern time, in Elizabethan times, but not in the olden days not otherwise specified. Our condescension is also part of melodrama. This did not have to be. It worked out badly but was not a necessary dénouement. It was cultural rather than existential. Stay away from the Denmark of an earlier time.
William Hazlitt was wrong to think that tragedy is concerned with existential matters while comedies are concerned with social matters. Both do both. Think of Twelfth Night. Melodrama, it has been suggested in the case of Hamlet, also deals with matters that are at the same time existential and social matters. There is the play of the intellectual against the courtier: Hamlet’s heightened consciousness set against the political state of mind rife in any court. There is also the play on a person set into a time and place from which he has become too far removed, as if he were in a tale of time travel and knows he does wrong to try to interfere in the ways of the more primitive race. These two plot motifs are woven out of confrontations that are existential in nature, in that they require the protagonist to violate the natural metaphysical order, as in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, so as to illuminate what is so moving and comical and strange about the disparities that exist in custom and in understanding between a consciousness and its surroundings and between one time and another time.
Another reason to think that melodrama is not so different from tragedy is that melodrama can be read as having meanings, both existential and social, rather than just as an entertainment which provides us with the occasion to have aroused in us both fearful and piteous emotions for the pleasure of us experiencing them, knowing full well we have been provoked into these feelings by the playwright’s ingenuity, which we can admire as our adrenalin levels go up and our sympathies are engaged, fully aware that it is a passing thing, not real, and so putting off rather than only anticipating the time when we too will be in a battle or in a cancer ward. Double Indemnity entertains us with a plan we do not have and the satisfaction that comes from that poor sucker getting his just reward; Walter Neff is therefore a case of schadenfreude.
But Walter Neff is also engaged in a battle with existential forces of which, as an insurance agent, he is well aware. The whole point of the examination of fraudulent claims is, as it were, to defend the laws of probability, as those are laid out in actuarial tables. Fraud is an attempt to avoid what those laws would dictate, those laws making possible not only insurance but the regularity of any number of aspects of life. Edward G. Robinson is more than Fortinbras; he is God overseeing his world, creating justice if for no other reason than to see to it that his laws of the existential universe remain in force. To Billy Wilder, who had personally earned this understanding, the two meanings of law—the laws of nature and the laws of man—are the same in that the laws of nature need enforcement against the madmen who would defy and defame them. The Nazis would overturn the objective, however complicated, relation of nature to nurture in their adherence to their doctrine of racial differences. Neff, for his part, is a defrocked angel much more than Satan is in Milton because his evil is so narrow, even as what he threatens is so large, which is that lust is indeed a major one of Satan’s tools.
If either the characters in a play or else the standard dramatic plot devices used in both tragedy and melodrama, such as recognition scenes or courtly audiences or romantic dalliances, can be read in either a tragic or melodramatic fashion, then what in the play gives warrant to reading it as one or the other? The key decision on the part of the audience lies in their reading of the plot. If a plot is read as having a crucial event happen at the beginning of the play, with the rest of the play an unfolding of what has been set early on, then the play is being read as a melodrama; if a plot is read as having a crucial event happen in the middle or towards the end of the play, even if earlier events had foreshadowed the crucial event, then the play is being read as a tragedy.
This proposition is contrary to the notion that tragedy is inevitable while melodrama is happenstance, the unexpected turns of a plot providing an audience with its pleasure. According to the mistaken view, a tragedy is there from the beginning of the play, waiting only to be unraveled. The drama is varied and made suspenseful by the art of dramatic construction. The crucial event in “Oedipus Rex” appears to be Oedipus becoming aware of what he had done, though that is because it is related as a mystery story, the king trying to get to the bottom of what happened. In fact, his fate was sealed at the beginning of his story when he, the stuff of kings, is brought to a peasant house to be raised. The same happens for the purposes of epic exultation rather than tragedy, to Moses, who is raised as an Egyptian prince but is destined by the plot of Exodus to have to come to terms with the fact that he had been born an Israelite, his masterful manner joined with his great cause, and so set from the beginning on a course to free his people. Melodrama, in that understanding, unites the critical event with the climax. The Gunfight at the OK Corral presents the last moments of the Western as when the important things happen, the rest preparation for the final confrontation, though that may be a convention of the Western rather than of the nature of melodrama.
That view of melodrama, however, mistakes the relation of critical early points to critical later points. Yes, Joseph Cotton finally meets Orson Welles at the Vienna Ferris wheel and all becomes clear not only in the plot but also in the mind of the finally disabused naïve American. The chase around the bar is exciting but a coda, a fifth act used to show how justice is finally done, as if that could undo what has come before. But The Third Man is more rightly read as tragic because it provides no way out from its early scenes that unfurl the duplicity and distrust at the heart of post war Vienna (a setting for corruption for Graham Greene as it was for Shakespeare). If Harry Lime did not exist, he would have to be inferred. For all his tragic sense of life, Hardy is correctly read as melodramatic rather than tragic because everything, you know from the beginning, is going to go downhill, the events that set that into place happening at the beginning. And for all his talk of an American tragedy, Dreiser is melodramatic because he sees social situations set in childhood as explaining what needs to be explained about what the characters will eventually do. He is a social commentator rather than a tragedian.
This point that a melodrama is there from the beginning while a tragedy requires one or more critical events to take place towards the end is easily made with Macbeth. The prediction of the witches can be taken to mean that Macbeth is destined to go from bad to worse however much he struggles with the trajectory he sees his life is taking. That takes the drama off in the direction of melodrama. Another case. The predictions can also be treated as mere omens without any control over the future. They can be altered through actions taken in the awareness of what the trajectory might well be. In that case, the climatic event is when Macbeth says that he will go on in blood. He has not so much accepted his fate as become identified with it, made himself over to be that way, where previously, with the death of others, he can be said to have been the inheritor of events, and that even with the death of Banquo, he feels guilt, as a human would, for bad things he has done that nonetheless profited him. In that tragic reading, the decisive moment doesn’t take place until Act III. It is a redefinition of personality rather than a particular event that turns the play onto its now inevitably downward course.
The same principle of reading a play as either a melodrama or a tragedy depending upon when the crucial event in the play takes place holds for Antony and Cleopatra. Reading the play as a melodrama is to give great weight to the opening speech where Philo announces the “dotage” into which Antony has fallen. So rather than the play building up to the notion that Antony has imperiled his reputation and his soul through his love for this queen, the play begins with it and so is allowed to take a different direction, one which simply spells out the extent of his humiliation and the diminishment of his soul. Since the claim is so broad, the viewer is likely to doubt the teller, and the suspense is sustained until Antony himself, a scene later, admits, in a soliloquy, that he is enthralled and has to pull himself together. As a melodrama, we see him strain against the bonds of his passion and come to understand the nature of that passion for a woman who admits readily enough, to both herself and to her servants, that she is manipulating Antony. She too, of course, may well be in the thralls of love, and so only thinks that she is in control of her manipulative wiles, excusing what she does for passion as something done for self interest. That may be, the audience will suspect, the way it is with all loves, and not just great ones: people think they are in control when they are not, and yet, whether in control or not, they use the resources of the self that they have been granted to either effect, so much so that neither they nor their beloved nor the audience can tell what is love and what is not other than in the declaration of it.
That scene is enough to indicate that the play can be read either tragically or melodramatically: do we attend to the nature of this love or to the depths of this humiliation, one and the other the same. Further scenes also allow reading the play as one or the other. When Antony informs Cleopatra that his wife Flavia is dead, just after hearing the news of her death causes him to remember her with respect, Cleopatra does not respond as a woman sympathetic to her lover would. Rather, she castigates Antony for having more of an interest in the dead than in the living, more concerned with his past life than his present one. This can be interpreted as the outrageous jealousy of an Egyptian who can make no compromise in her demands on her beloved, devoid as it is of a Roman’s sense of honor. That Anthony is not made angry by it, or bides his anger, suggests that he has already given in to the Egyptian point of view; he is so smitten that he has no resources to defend anything he once held dear. Read tragically, that means he steps more deeply into his servitude to Cleopatra every day, acting in a way he would have thought not long before to be shameful.
It is easier, however, to read that scene melodramatically. Its outcome had been telegraphed in the prior scene where Cleopatra said she would keep Anthony close to her by taunting him rather than by showering him with endearments. So Cleopatra is like a soap opera heroine in that you always know what she is up to and you know she is a sinister figure rather than a puzzling or singular one. Melodrama divides people into being, on the whole, good or bad, with a few nuances thrown in just to keep things interesting. Cleopatra is clearly manipulative rather than sincere. The audience is never allowed to think her love for Anthony should be taken on its face—other than in the sense that the way she loves is the way she loves: sly, grasping, selfish, so un-Roman. The surprise in the melodramatic reading—for melodrama does allow surprise, even if the choices characters make are preordained—is how schooled Antony is in how to deal with Cleopatra, how to calm her down, how to ride out her anger and her anguish. He is like a member of an old married couple which has found out how to accommodate one another’s ways. And yet they had not been lovers that long. There is an edge in lovers acting this way. There is no indication that he is resisting her, only that he is putting up with her, not to win her, for that is done, but so as to get on with the next moment. Antony has tamed his shrew and so been tamed by her. The scene has more yelling in it, perhaps, than would occur with lovers who had long been related to one another, and it is some satisfaction to an audience to hear their exchanges, far more aria-like than most lovers can manage. And yet we are left uninformed as to whether this is just the way it is or whether it is a shock to Antony’s system to learn from the scene how far he has come from being a Roman.
And so it goes in the scenes after that, Antony always showing enough of a sense of where his emotions should be at that the audience can at least hope that he come to himself, see the situation as it is, make some dramatic or tragic gesture that will not, perhaps, earn him back his fortune but at least earn him back some of his honor. Then, in what seems to me the central scene of the play, he gives in to Cleopatra’s military advice, which is to go for a battle at sea, using her ships, rather than to use his army in a land battle. Coming under Cleopatra’s sway in matters of love or even court intrigue is one thing; to surrender his judgment about military matters is quite another. It is to jump fully into his un-Roman character. It is a considered judgment, his last chance at freedom, and after that, what clings to him are the vestiges of Roman character, as when he tells his attendants to take his treasure ship, rather than that his Roman spirit is any longer the chief guide of his character. The final descent is fully pathetic, a man aware of his undoing and how he has contributed to it, even if, with some effort, this can be seen as a descent noble in its self-consciousness, and therefore tragic. Either way, the scenes are each capable of an orotund, and so melodramatic, reading, or of a subdued, and therefore tragic, reading.
The proof of the pudding is in the testing, which means that the proposition that tragedies can be read as melodramas, depending on where the critical moment of the play takes place, can be applied in reverse form: melodramas can also be read as tragedies if the critical moment is pushed downfield. Readers and audiences regularly “overrate” a melodrama and make it about grander issues than are actually at stake. Double Indemnity is taken to be about the nature of greed and lust when it is mostly about the scheming of two particularly limited people who want to take advantage of a loophole in the system and then get found out by an insurance investigator. As Billy Wilder knew, because of his striking images of the insurance office, the movie is about deploying the eternals of greed and lust within the confines of the idea of insurance, and that the two sets of emotions do not go easily together. If you look at the movie through the lens of the early scenes in the insurance office, then catching the murder is inevitable, because you know Edward G. Robinson is being regarded too lightly. If you look at the movie through the growing attachment, in spite of himself, of Fred MacMurray to Barbara Stanwyck, then you see him being drawn away from a reasonable assessment of what the probabilities of life will allow. Neff becomes Antony.
The same is true of those Shakespeare plays that are primarily understood as melodramas, even though they are routinely called problem plays because they have tragic themes and yet people seem to come out all right in the end. Measure for Measure, for the most part, is melodramatic. A magistrate who is tyrannical and puritanical tries to coerce a woman to trade her virtue for the life of her brother, who has been condemned to death. She is saved, in the nick of time, by the return of the absent king. This is Tosca, except for the fact that Tosca got everybody into trouble and saved nobody. And so Tosca is tragic only by the rule that all of the major characters in the opera are dead by the time it ends and by writing off Tosca’s behavior as either crazy or in the service of Victorian prudery. Tosca is a melodrama in that it is deep in sadness and deformed personalities and no one ever rises beyond the sorrows inflicted on them by an authoritarian state.
Measure for Measure can be read the same way, except that the audience is misdirected to read it as a comedy because everybody pairs off at the end just as they do in Shakespearean comedy. The rub, of course, is that most of them don’t want the partners they get, the assignments the result of the moral appropriateness of the pairings rather than that joy will result in all of these unions. People get who they deserve, which is a reprise of the Dante view, referred to earlier in the play by the Duke, that people do get their just desserts. The play, moreover, is full of what are conventional melodramatic devices. There is the stretching out of suspense, Claudio announced as dead, a rather cruel act by the Duke, just so that he can be woven into the revelation scene at the end of the play that is used to restore “justice” to the world. The play even teases the audience by finding Barnardine to serve as a substitute for Claudio and then having to move on to some other plot contrivance when Barnardine is used instead for comic purposes. The whole of the plot would seem to stretch out the issue of Isabella’s virtue much too long, she protesting too much, rather like Judith in the Bible going on about not having sacrificed her virtue so that she could get in to kill the enemy general. And the Duke is too long winded in his sometimes opaque and casuistic explanations of how morality works. These are only mildly amusing when the audience remembers that people’s lives are at stake. Indeed, critics generally agree that there is not much to be said for any of the characters in the play. There is hardly a noble property in any of them, only “the seeming” of nobility, especially in the Duke, who seems to be toying with his creatures.
The key to this melodramatic reading of Measure for Measure is at the beginning of the play. The king has appointed the magistrate to be in charge so that he can test him, which is what happens in “Job” if you read the beginning dialogue between God and Satan as integral. Yes, the passage may have been added centuries later to make the work more palatable to a more sentimental and conventionally pious audience. Hellenistic philosophy is in that way reduced to emotions appropriate at the time of the Apocrypha. If Measure for Measure is read that way, then Angelo, invested with the powers of the Duke, not knowing that the Duke will remain around to arrange things to work out the way he wants them to, is corrupted by his powers until he takes a final leap into evil by trying to have his way with Isabella. That power corrupts is an old theme, as old as Herodotus, and one that is not restricted to tragedy.
Now, reread (or replay) Measure for Measure as a tragedy. The Duke is a somewhat fumbling God in that he always has to improvise to move his creatures around to do what he wishes them to do. They resist doing what their noble sides would seem to call for. Isabella will not save her brother; Angelo will not remain honorable. The crucial point can be set at the moment of the bedroom trick, where every one who participates has defamed themselves in that Angelo has extorted sex; Mariana has whored herself to her own husband (a trick reworked by Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies); and Isabella has served as her procuress, with the assistance of the Duke disguised as a monk. The deceit that is supposed to keep everybody pure makes all those complicit in it dirty. They have gotten themselves into a Christian tragedy, never mind that the God figure who presides over the mischief seems, at that point, only to be getting his way as the behind the scene master of his universe.
The crucial point can be placed even later, in the resolution scene. An old production of Measure for Measure that was done by Theatre for a New Audience nicely balanced the melodramatic reading of the play, as that concerns a municipality out to close its bawdy houses without acknowledging the bad effects of such a decree, much less the defects of authoritarian rule, with the tragic reading of the play, which is that having God appear in the world is not necessarily a good thing because his intentions are not human nor humane. But people choose to do what God wants because they do see some justice in what he requests, while they always have the option of refusing to do what He wants. Angelo is ordered to reunite with Mariana, and agrees to do so; Lucio agrees to marry the bawd who had borne his child, even though it seems more punishment than benefit. And Isabella is silent before the Duke’s request to marry him, even though she had wanted to become a nun and so be married to God. She may be having second thoughts about that ambition. Indeed, Arin Arbus, the director of that production, went so far as to have the actor playing the Duke sigh in relief when everyone accepts his arrangements. They have done this of their own free will and have, finally, justified God’s plan to test his people, though it might have gone the other way. People make the best of the bad deals they have been dealt, and in that is, sort of, a kind of salvation.
There are large implications in understanding how Shakespearean melodrama and Shakespearean tragedy are opposite sides of the same coin. One has to do with the significance of that other Aristotelian characteristic of drama: the setting. The usual view is that the settings of the great tragedies are of no account. Shakespeare has simply chosen the names of far off places so as to give the plays an air of mystery. Denmark might as well have been named Illyria. That however is not the case. William Hazlitt argued that Shakespeare’s comedies were different from Shakespeare’s tragedies in that the comedies concerned the peculiarities of social structure, humor found in the less than seamless web of social life, so that Malvolio can think himself more worthy than his person or his station deserves. It is funny for him to think so much of himself because he is so obviously of a lower social class and everybody knows that, and so this is an object of humor rather than of anger or tragedy, as is the case in Richard III, where the protagonist is able to enforce his ambitious and ignoble motives. What Hazlitt said about comedy can be modified so that it applies to melodrama, which exploits the peculiarities of the particular social structure of a society, people caught up in the preoccupations of that culture, and the cultural blindness inherent in any culture, rather than in the basic furniture of the human condition which is the topic of tragedy, though it is also the topic of grand comedy, such as Twelfth Night, which is after all, about gender confusion, loss and redemption and any number of other themes that apply in all of human life.
If we read Hamlet as a melodrama, then it is important to understand the particular social setting, even if the play is often situated by whoever puts on a production in some nineteenth century never-never land so that actors can wear greatcoats and actresses can wear long gowns rather than having them dress up in those Elizabethan costumes that seem so ridiculous. Denmark is not far from Northern Germany and the reformation. Hamlet went to Wittenberg and is returning to the borders of civilized Europe and its pagan ways, complete with ghosts and the election of kings who legitimize themselves by marrying the widow of the prior king. Only Hamlet notices that as inappropriate. Kenneth Branaugh was right to think of Fortinbras’ army slogging through snow to reach a remote Elsinore.
Lear’s kingdom, for its part, is on the brink of becoming a civil society. The idea of the crown is only narrowly distinct from its being a family possession, the various branches of the family each loyal to only themselves rather than to some national structure. Lear was trying to divide up his kingdom in the way Charlemagne did, so that three nations would be established, so that the kingdom would not regress into a set of tribes. The same thing happened in the Old Testament. Patriarchal families negotiate with one another; Moses establishes a single people who are not too happy about the idea that there will be a single law giver. Shakespeare treats Denmark in the same way. It is desperately caught up in a succession crisis and can find no resolution but a relative who seems a usurper because his claim is based on having married the wife of the late king. Hamlet is caught between family matters and matters of state. Is his distrust of the old pattern of usurpation based on an allegiance to a new notion of sovereignty or rather a throwback to when communal politics were about family politics, his allegiance to a dead father trumping his allegiance to the state? In general, Shakespeare is in many plays concerned with that moment when a new kind of social contract is established, the one that goes beyond clan. Macbeth the play challenges the idea that Macbeth the murderer is assuming power in a way very much out of the ordinary. A new Scotland will be established from abroad. And so the substance of the plays cannot be separated from their setting.
And, of course, Antony and Cleopatra has long been noted for establishing an Egyptian state of mind to contrast with the Roman state of mind. It is not hard for an Egyptian to think of a woman as winding herself around a man and so coming to dominate politics. What the play concerns is how Antony falls not just for Cleopatra but for the Egyptian way of thinking about life, which Shakespeare takes to be a vice. Shakespeare thereby universalizes what happens in Egypt. He takes the Egyptian way of doing things as a betrayal of the human condition, which requires that men keep women, for the most part, in their place so that men can go on to do the manly thing of deciding when is the right time to get on with a war as well as how to rationally calculate who to align with and who to betray.
Shakespeare is certainly a man of ideas, and it is certainly correct for students of Shakespeare to write papers on the idea of fate in Macbeth or the role of race and convention in the world of Othello. That is not to update Shakespeare but to hit his permanent and universal themes. But what literary critics also try to do is an archeology of the reader’s mind, to try to establish some never to be realized naïve reader who never really existed who looks at a work not from the point of view of its ideas but from the point of view of how it is experienced, its singular and universal emotions, the nuances of its characters, the tones that pervade the work, and so to come to treat these aspects of the work as its fundamental features. If this job is successfully done, then the way a work creates its effects is the same thing as the effect it creates, which is what it is, the ideas a rather abstracted way of getting at that, the ideas unnecessary except as a crutch to lead you into the work. From that point of view, it has to be said that Shakespeare always writes large. We put that aside as amusing or diverting when we take his works as tragedies. Bad people don’t, in real life, know how bad they are, and people aren’t such stereotypes of themselves, living out their own types. The world is a subtler, smoother place, where everything is ambiguous.
Shakespeare is granted a dispensation from that ordinary wisdom because he looks so deeply into the hearts of people and because he creates situations which bring out the best and worst of people in language far grander and more attuned to the emotions being projected than anything real people might say. That dispensation is, however, unnecessary, however much we have been trained to it by centuries of scholarship and by teachers who tell us of Shakespeare’s subtleties. It is a more accurate reading of Shakespeare to be more crude and to notice how attracted we are by how repulsive are most of his characters, Hamlet and Antony, not just the great villains, such as Richard III, and an Othello who resists but finally gives in to his villainy. The meanness and melodrama ascribed to “Troilus and Cressida” is there all the way through, just not so cynically put. Shakespeare is not for the faint of heart.
There is another point to be made. Setting melodrama against tragedy as two different ways to contemplate the same events treats the genre as the guide to the emotions suitable to the work done in that genre and also determines how one will look at the causal relations to be taken to be at work in a particular play or novel—whether the crucial events are at the beginning or at the end, for instance. But that is to look at literature through the lens of the genre rather than to look at the literature as a representation of the world. If that is the highest value, then the entertainment provided by a work following through on the conventions of its genre is less pressing as we seek more for verisimilitude, which can be summarized as requiring people to be at every moment capable of decisions that can change their lives. They have not been placed in a tragedy or a melodrama so as to play out their roles in these, but are rather free to make them one or the other or neither or even outside of genre, as those, at least, are generally understood. People may see their lives either as tragedies wherein they roll their rocks uphill. or as melodramas wherein they are doomed to be the petty people they are, or as comedies, wherein people rise beyond their circumstances, somehow always keeping their heads above water. Not all great works do that. Anna Karenina is doomed either early on or later; Willy Loman was doomed before the play began, or maybe only when he committed suicide. Arthur Miller does not make that clear. But some great works do rise to that level, even if it takes a great work to do so.
The richness of Great Expectations, for its part, comes from the fact that you do not know what Pip would do, from beginning to end. He might well have informed Magwitch, for there was no reason for him not to, once he was safe, but he chose not to do so, perhaps out of some sympathy for a man so out on the edge, and so it makes sense for Magwitch to show gratitude many years later. Even at the end of the novel, when, presumably, everything has been played out, you do not know whether Pip will or should pick up again with Estella, the great love of his life. That is why Dickens provides two endings. The alternatives are not a copout to satisfy his audience but recognition that even at the end things are still up in the air, stories extended by their characters through choices made after the covers are closed. And Othello, of course, whatever his motivations, might have reconsidered strangling Desdemona, even at the last minute. He is always a free man, and so he is tragic.
Even Hamlet can be redeemed as neither tragic nor melodramatic, the shortcomings of the play resolved by thinking it a representation of real life in that the protagonist goes back and forth, constantly second guessing himself, unable to plan a course of action, this a consequence of the existential condition that not everyone perceives which is that one can always negate the past and make a different future or step back into an old future or continue to choose to live the way one does. So what was previously described as the dramatic shortcomings of Hamlet is only its refusal to be either tragedy or melodrama. But that may simply revive the idea that there are superior and inferior genres of literature: the existential drama more keen than either tragedy or melodrama, those two now put on somewhat the same level. Tragedy and melodrama sometimes rise to that unnamed superior genre. Such goes one of the conundrums that fill literary theory: how is the idea of a “better” or “great” work related to the idea of a different kind of work?