A Comparative Study of Shakespeare’s Tragic Plays

Pages:331-332
Pardeep Kumar (Faculty of English and Communication, Haryana Institute of Technology, Haryana)

William Shakespeare is a remarkable genius not only of his age, but also for all time. He is the greatest dramatist in the English Literature who is considered next to Sophocles in the world. He was the pioneer Elizabethan dramatist. To approach the subject it will be good without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start direct from the facts and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy. His earliest plays Love’s Labours Lost; Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona, provide the evidence of his entrance in the string society and his knowledge and observation to depict them in the plays. Shakespeare’s first plays were his well work and he made a place on the theatre as well as in the next ten years he achieved a prominent place that even two years later his work on plays was exactly like his contemporary playwrights. He was fascinated by the charm and beauty of the little village, Stratford. The Forest of Arden and the old castles of Warwick impressed him. It awoke his imagination power. The natural beauty of this region is reflected in Shakespeare’s poetry as his characters show the goodness, the vices, gossip, emotions and prejudices with traditions of the people concerned to him. A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side. No amount of calamity which merely befell a man, descending from the clouds like lightning, or stealing from the darkness like pestilence, could alone provide the substance of its story.