Let me take but one example to highlight the difficulty of trying to fit an Anne Shakespeare tragedy into an Aristotelian view of tragedy. Bradley (1957, p. 86) suggests that what ails Hamlet is melancholy, “a state of profound melancholy”; what is not spelled out by this approach is how is melancholy aligned to tragedy (that is, there are many people suffering from melancholy, but would one assume that because of this ailment that they are all tragic in some way?). Yet when we turn to the quote earlier from the Sophoclean play of Antigone it is quite plainly spelled out that the reason why Creon is punished by the gods is because he defied them (as did his punishment of Antigone follow on from her defiance of his edict). In this difficulty I can see that there are many such critics as Bradley (1957) who fall into this trap of identifying a possible “fatal flaw” in the hero but are not able to articulate why this particular flaw should lead on to a sense of the tragic; especially if they persist in defining tragedy along the lines of an Aristotelian view of tragedy. The challenge for any critic in overcoming this difficulty is to articulate how the character “flaw” leads to tragedy? This especially the case where a critic may hang the whole edifice for tragedy upon the hook of a “tragic flaw” to explain why it is tragic because everyone has one or possibly more “flaws” in their character and yet not everyone’s situation of circumstance can be considered tragic. This is why it is imperative that we understand what Anne Shakespeare’s view is of tragedy.
In my estimation it is not a “flaw” that leads to empathy, but it is a conflict (i) within the character, (ii) between characters and (iii) against social norms and values that leads to the tragedy. And this conflict can be narrowed down to what Anne views as her core beliefs (see Summers, 2022; 2024; 2025) in love, free will, humanism (moral philosophy) and their understanding of human nature. That is, the conflict arising is an internal conflict within the mind of the tragic hero, an external conflict between characters and/or the conflict arising from the tragic hero’s conflict with social values, rules and norms. It is this conflict that induces empathy and ends not with the punishment by the gods or God but ends with the ineffability and unknown of existence, of the human condition, of death and the question of what has existence meant? It is not nihilistic because we (the audience and even other characters within the play) have empathy for the heroic figure; the one who with all of these existential struggles has fought to come to an understanding of what their life means only to find that any explanation is not enough; they die with this question unanswered and we, the audience (and other characters within the play) are left wondering at the why, how and what the existence of the tragic hero meant. This is the essence of an Anne Shakespeare tragedy. How much of the tragic can be associated with Anne’s own situation around the turn of the 16th century; why did she write them at this moment, what did they mean for her and why write in the tragic form? Was Anne suffering from an existential crisis herself (and this gets translated into her heroic characters, both male and female).
The questions and observations on Hamlet, which comprises the first of the four plays I will be analysing, are as follows (not final but just ad hoc thoughts and observations which I highlight in my notes in bold):
(to be continued)