Season Thirteen – John Webster and Tragedy

Hume is one of the very few writers to discuss the question: Why is tragedy enjoyable? There is certainly no shortage of studies of tragedy itself; of its structure, its form, and its history; no shortage of  discussions of the beauties of its principal instances. Philosophers, æstheticians and critics from Aristotle on have tried to tell us what tragedy is, how it is made, how it works, how it affects us. But scarcely anyone deals with what ought to be the central question: Why do we enjoy it: Why are certain spectacles of death and suffering fun?

And why are they fun of a particular kind? The appreciation of tragedy is not simply a grisly delight in watching others squirm, or the repellent fascination that may hold us when we witness the suffering of strangers. Horror films and monster films, movies that distribute death and dismemberment benefits to nubile adolescents may be enjoyable, but the enjoyment is clearly of a different kind. Janet Leigh’s death in a shower in Psycho (and the myriad imitations of it) may be powerful and moving, but simply not in the same way as the deaths of Cordelia, Desdemona, or Ophelia. Certainly the final stake through the heart (or whatever death is meted out to the monster) affords a satisfaction to the audience, but not the same satisfaction as the sight of Macbeth’s head. It is not that the movies go too far in their grisly displays or that the gore seems gratuitous.

Indeed, the complaint that in popular screen melodramas scenes of sex and violence are gratuitous, is mistaken in a very significant way. They are not gratuitous at all: they are the point of the whole work. It is the rest of a melodramatic or pornographic work—the plot, the characterization, the dialogue—which is gra-tuitous. These elements are, after all, merely framing devices or contexts or moral justifications for the important stuff: the spectacle of human bodies torn apart or brought together.

In tragedy violence really is gratuitous. In tragedy death is the context, the frame, for the important stuff: the spectacle of human minds and hearts and souls torn apart or brought together. Greek tragedy did without the gratuities entirely.  The death always took place off-stage. Even in Renaissance tragedy, even in the Jacobean “tragedy of blood” (which includes The Duchess of Malfi ) the deaths are really quite bloodless, or ought to be. The leading cause of death for Shakespearean characters is a stab wound in some vital organ located eight inches upstage of the chest.

That is why the joking complaint that tragic (or operatic) heroes cannot die without first making a long speech (or singing an aria) misses the point. The speech is fundamental, the death is only the occasion for it.

Tragedy shows us characters who confront the most difficult and inevitable moments of life, usually the last moments, and deal with their terrors gracefully, heroically, beautifully. The pleasure of tragedy consists in watching that grace, that heroism, that beauty. It is not the final plunge into the grave that we want to watch, it is the posture and the dance at its edge. Tragedy is fun because the dance looks like a triumph.

Comedy is about failure, and a comparison with that form is instructive. What death is to tragedy, sex is to comedy. It is not the sex act itself that is important; that is as gratuitous in comedy as the death act is in tragedy. Comedy is about all the activity that leads to and follows from sex and procreation. Comedy is about courtship, and nesting, and territorial marking, and dominance, and plumage and all the other Darwinian business that happens at the foot of the bed. The strategy of comedy is to show us these things done, not triumphantly, but foolishly and ineptly,  and to provoke our laughter.

It is worth noting that there is a genre of drama that shows us the same things done successfully. It is called romance, and romances are thought of as a kind of comedy when the focus is on the love story (The Tempest, for instance) or as a kind of tragedy when the focus is on the difficult triumph (The Winter’s Tale, for instance.) There must also be a fourth genre, if we think of the drama in this way, but there is no accepted name for it. It is the kind of play that deals with foolish or inept dying. Here the dance at the edge of the grave is not a triumph but a burgomask; a fish-slapping dance. Shakespeare’s most puzzling plays, Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida seem to fit here.

But from time to time the theatre seems to concentrate on one form more or less unalloyed. In Athens under Pericles, in London under Elizabeth and James, playwrights sustained a tragic sensibility of uncommon purity. It is at the end of that latter period, during the reign of James, the tragic vision seemed to reach its greatest clarity. Shakespeare’s darkest plays, Macbeth and Lear, belong to this period. And Shakespeare’s greatest disciple, John Webster, flourished then. But Webster’s unflinching gaze at human terror is never merely grisly, and never depressing. His beautiful doomed characters, brilliant as meteorites, thrill us with that ineffable tragic feeling. Webster himself best described that feeling in his other masterpiece, The White Devil. Flamineo, the hero-villian of that play, looking at his own handiwork, observes;