Mirzayeva ozoda course work theme: Female characters in Shakespeare's comedies (Portia ("The Merchant of Venice"), Rosalind

2.1. The nature of Shakespeare’s

Tragedy can be classified in a broad and narrow way. The narrowly defined tragedy refers to a kind of artistic style and dramatic genre, which has a relative

status with comedy. The broadly defined tragedy is a category of aesthetics. It includes realistic aesthetic, artistic aesthetic ¹⁴ etc. Originating from the ancient Greece and developing afterwards till now, the European tragedy has a long history of more than 2000 years.
For example, in Henry V he refers to the messenger god as Hermes (Greek name) rather than Mercury (Roman name). The names of some deities—such as the god of prophecy, Apollo—were the same in Greek and Roman mythology, as indicated later on this page. Be aware also that a few gods were Roman inventions. Janus is an example. Tragic hero is generally person of importance tragic hero shows Extraordinary capabilities and a tragic flaw tragic flaw fatal error in judgment or Weakness in character that leads to downfall. A tragedy is a narrative about serious and Important actions that end unhappily. Usually a tragedy ends with the deaths of the Main characters. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres. He raised to the pea of sophistication and the artistry by the end of the
16thcentury.recounts a series of Event in the life of a person of significant, the tragic hero. The purpose of tragedy is to Arouse the emotions of pity and fear in audience a tragedy shows missed potential. Tragic hero is usually at the peak of his carrier with everything going well for him When tragedy strikes. The tragic hero usually dies at the end of the play. The tragic Hero is essentially a good man with a character weakness tragic flaw. The tragic hero is Faced with external forces of pressures that require him to make the wrong decision And because of his tragic flaw both plays and poems were included in it. The Important element in it was the story and not character. It was made to fall by chance or fate or gods, Shakespeare changed all this expect in one detail, after examining his Four tragedy thus’’ tragedy with Shakespeare is conceded always with persons of high Degree: often Kings or princes
_{or leaders in the state, like Coriolanus, Brutus, Antonio As in Romeo Juliet with}


¹⁴ . Calhoun, E. (1999). Teaching beginning reading and writing with the picture word inductive model. Alexandria: ASCD.
European Culture: An Introduction[M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, p.78.
members of great houses. Whose quarrels are of leading to The death of a ¹⁵man in high estate, but no amount of calamity leading to the death of a Man in high state. But no amount of calamity which merely befell a man, descending from the clouds’ like lighting, could alone provide the substance of its story. The calamities of a tragedy do not simply happen nor are they sent from heaven or are the results of god’s wrath.
The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy.

Concept and features of Shakespearean tragedy. Unlike Greek tragedy, Shakespeare uses comic relief. Outside forces may contribute to hero's downfall events lead to catastrophic conclusion. This conclusion usually involves death. Tragic heroes usually recognize his /her flaw Shakespearean wrote tragedies from the beginning of his career Two further warnings may be required in the first place. We must remember that the tragic aspect of life is only one aspect. We cannot arrive at Shakespeare’s whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone as we can arrive at Milton’s way of regarding things. In approaching our subject it will be best without attempting to shorten the path by reforming to famous, theories of the drama. The story next leads up to and includes, the death of the hero on the one hand no play at the end of which the here remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense a tragedy: and we no longer class Troilus and Cressida or Cymbeline as such, as did the editions of the folio. On the other hand, the story depicts also the troubled part of the hero’s life. When we are immersed in a tragedy we feel towards dispositions actions and persons such emotions as attraction and repulsion pity wonder fear horror perhaps hatred but we do not judge. This is a point of view which emerges only when in reading a play we slip by our own fault or the dramatists’ from the tragic position or when, in thinking about the play afterwards, we fall back on our everyday legal and moral notions. But tragedy does not belong any more than religion belongs to the sphere of these notions nether dose the

_{imaginative attitude in presence of it while we are in its world we watch is seeing}


¹⁵ Shakespeare William (1930). Edited by W. J. Craig. Shakespeare's Complete works[M]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.380-385.
that so it happened and must have happened feeling that it is piteous dreadful awful mysterious but neither passing sentence on the argents nor asking whether the behavior of the ultimate power towards them is just and therefore the use of such language in attempts to render our imaginative experience it terms of the understanding is to say the use of such language in attempts to render our imaginative experience.
When we think about Shakespearean tragedy, the plays we usually have in mind are Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. That core list of nine can be expanded to twelve, however, if we include the history plays Richard III and Richard II, both of which were also billed as tragedies in Shakespeare’s day, and Timon of Athens, whose claim to inclusion is more questionable, but which is listed as one of the tragedies on the contents page (the ‘Catalogue’) of the 1623 First Folio. So, for that matter, is Cymbeline, though no one could make a credible case for its belonging there, when it plainly belongs with the late romances – Pericles, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest – with which it’s long been grouped. Troilus and Cressida, on the other hand, despite being advertised in an earlier edition as a first-rate comedy, is also entitled a tragedy in the First Folio, but not listed at all in the Catalogue and placed ambiguously – as befits its unclassifiable nature – between the histories and the tragedies.
The more one ponders the question of what qualifies as a Shakespearean tragedy, the more complicated it can become. So modern studies of Shakespeare’s tragedies tend to focus on the plays whose right to the title is undisputed, and treat each one separately as a self-contained tragedy, leaving the question of what unites them unaddressed or unresolved. There’s a lot to be said for approaching each tragedy first and foremost as a unique work of dramatic art in its own right. And the temptation to boil them all down to the same generic formula should obviously be resisted. But it would be equally misguided to rule out the possibility of identifying what the tragedies have in common without dissolving the differences between them. For that would mean denying the strong sense most people have, when
watching or reading these plays, that there’s something distinctively Shakespearean

about their tragic vision that sets them apart from other kinds of tragedy.

Romeo and Juliet

So what is it that stamps a play as the kind of tragedy that merits the term

‘Shakespearean’? The detailed answer that question demands is beyond the scope of this brief introduction. But the basic points of the argument it would entail can be outlined here, and my articles on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth should go some way towards fleshing them out.

Romeo and Juliet

So what is it that stamps a play as the kind of tragedy that merits the term

‘Shakespearean’? The detailed answer that question demands is beyond the scope of this brief introduction. But the basic points of the argument it would entail can be outlined here, and my articles on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth should go some way towards fleshing them out.

Shakespeare’s earliest tragedies, Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare’s immortal couple have become a global byword for lovers driven unjustly to their doom because they belong to warring factions that refuse to tolerate their love. During the last four centuries the play has inspired countless adaptations and offshoots on stage and screen, as well as operas, symphonies, fiction, poetry and paintings. But Romeo and Juliet couldn’t have acquired its enduring resonance, if the significance and value of the tragedy were trapped in the time when Shakespeare wrote it. If the play made sense and mattered only in terms of that time, it wouldn’t be able to reach across the centuries and speak with such urgency to so many different cultures now. That Romeo and Juliet is rooted in the age of Shakespeare, and can’t be fully understood without some knowledge of the world it sprang from, hardly needs demonstrating. But no critical account or production can do justice to Romeo and Juliet, if it’s not alert to the ways in which it was far ahead of Shakespeare’s time and is still far ahead of ours too.
The key point should become clear if we turn to one of Shakespeare’s earliest tragedies, Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare’s immortal couple have become a global
byword for lovers driven unjustly to their doom because they belong to warring factions that refuse to tolerate their love. During the last four centuries the play has inspired countless adaptations and offshoots on stage and screen, as well as operas, symphonies, fiction, poetry and paintings. But Romeo and Juliet couldn’t have acquired its enduring resonance, if the significance and value of the tragedy were trapped in the time when Shakespeare wrote it. If the play made sense and mattered only in terms of that time, it wouldn’t be able to reach across the centuries and speak with such urgency to so many different cultures now. That Romeo and Juliet is rooted in the age of Shakespeare, and can’t be fully understood without some knowledge of the world it sprang from, hardly needs demonstrating. But no critical account or production can do justice to Romeo and Juliet, if it’s not alert to the ways in which it was far ahead of Shakespeare’s time and is still far ahead of ours too.
Construction in Shakespeare Tragedies

Having discussed the substances of a Shakespearean tragedy, we should naturally go on to examine the form; under this head many things might be included; for example, Shakespeare’s methods of characterization, his language, his versification, the construction of his plots. I intend, however, to speak only for the last of these subjects, which has been somewhat neglected; as construction is a more or less technical. The famous critics of the ¹⁶romantic revival seem to have paid very little attention to this subjects have writing an interesting book on Shakespeare as dramatic artist Imparts of my analysis I am much in debated to dramas a book which deserves to be much better known than it appears to be to English man interested in the drama. I may add, foe the benefit to classical scholars, that Freytag has a chapter on Sophocles. The reader of his book will easily distinguish, if he cares to, the places where I write in independence of him. I may add that in speaking of construction I have thought if best to assume in my hearers no previous knowledge of the subject;

_{that I have not attempted to discuss how much of what is said of Shakespeare.}


¹⁶ . Kirk G.S(1990). The Nature of Greek Myths[M]. Penguin, p.7.
[10] Wang Zuoliang (1992). 12. Shakespeare William (2009). The works of William Shakespeare[M]. Charleston: Bilbao Life, p.65.
As Shakespearean tragedy represents a conflict which reminds in a catastrophe, any such tragedy may roughly be divided into three parts the first of these sets further expounds the situation, or state of affairs, out of which the conflict. it forms accordingly the bulk of the play, comprising the second, third and fourth acts, and usually a part of the first and a part of the fifth. The final section of the tragedy shows the issues of the conflict in a catastrophe. The application of this scheme of division is naturally more or less arbitrary. The first part glides into the second, and the second into the third, and there may often be difficulty in drawing the lines between them but it is still harder to divide spring from summer, and summer from autumn; and yet springs is spring, and summer is summer. The dramatist’s chief difficulty in the exposition is obvious and it is illustrated clearly enough in the plays of unpracticed writers; for example, in remorse and even in the Cenci. He has to impart to the audience a quantity or information about matters of which they generally know all that is necessary for his purpose but the process of merely acquiring information is unpleasant, and the direct imparting of it is unromantic. Unless he uses a prologue, therefore, he must cancel from his auditors the fact that they are being informed, and must tell them what he wants them to know by means which are interesting on their own account. These means, with Shakespeare, are not only speeches but actions and events. From the very beginning of the play, though are conflict has not arisen, things are happening and being done which in some degree arrest, startle and excite; and in a few scenes we have mastered the situation of affairs without perceiving the dramatists’ designs upon us not that this is always so with Shakespeare. in the opening speech of Richard III, we feel that the speakers are addressing us; and in the second scene of the tempest the purpose of Prospero’s long explanation to Miranda is palpable but in general Shakespeare’s expositions are masterpieces.
Aristotle once defined the tragedy as follows: "Tragedy was an imitation of a serious, complete and long action; bringing about compassion and fear to edify this kind of feeling." Aristotle's definition reflected a basic theme in ancient Greek tragedies—"tragedy of hero" composed of the confrontation between human being
and their fate. This kind of tragedy usually presented that the powerful and inevitable power of fate defeated the "noble hero" as an individual. In ancient Greek myths, Oedipus was supported to be the king for finding out the answer to Sphinx. He had to leave his family for avoiding the oracle of killing his father and marrying his mother, but finally the oracle came true. Facing the cruel reality, Oedipus stabbed his eyes and banished himself to look for penance. The inscription in the face of Apollo "To Know Yourself" had a close relationship with Oedipus. He could guess the riddle of Sphinx but could not guess the riddle of his own fate.
In the story of ancient Greek and Roman myths, both Gods and heroes had a strong spirit of revolting against the pressure and the power. Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele. From the very beginning, he was persecuted by Hera. Later, he fought for a long time against Apollo. Dionysus fought against all kinds of persecutions. He wandered without any stop, taught people to cultivate grapes and make wine and spread his own thought. The primogenitor of human being Prometheus taught people to build houses and cure diseases. He stole the fire of heaven at the risk of his own life. In order to force him to surrender, Zeus tied him to the rock on the Caucasus Mountain and tortured him every day. But Prometheus never gave in to Zeus and finally was saved. Prometheus' spirit of revolting against the authority was both a kind of praise and encouragement. The returning Odysseus after the Trojan war was persecuted for ten years for offending Poseidon, God of sea. During the ten years, with his own strong perseverance, wisdom and bravery, Odysseus never gave up, fought with all kinds of difficulties and finally returned home. Shakespeare's plays also were full of characters with spirit of rebellion. These characters fought strongly against all kinds of pressures and authorities either for pursuing their own love or for their own dreams. Shakespeare's tragedies, as mentioned above, demonstrated the revolt against the authority for love or dream in a direct or positive way.
When we think about Shakespearean tragedy, the plays we usually have in mind are Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. That core list of nine can be
expanded to twelve, however, if we include the history plays Richard III and Richard II, both of which were also billed as tragedies in Shakespeare’s day, and Timon of Athens, whose claim to inclusion is more questionable, but which is listed as one of the tragedies on the contents page (the ‘Catalogue’) of the 1623 First Folio. So, for that matter, is Cymbeline, though no one could make a credible case for its belonging there, when it plainly belongs with the late romances – Pericles, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest – with which it’s long been grouped. Troilus and Cressida, on the other hand, despite being advertised in an earlier edition as a first-rate comedy, is also entitled a tragedy in the First Folio, but not¹⁷ listed at all in the Catalogue and placed ambiguously – as befits its unclassifiable nature – between the histories and the tragedies.
The more one ponders the question of what qualifies as a Shakespearean tragedy, the more complicated it can become. So modern studies of Shakespeare’s tragedies tend to focus on the plays whose right to the title is undisputed, and treat each one separately as a self-contained tragedy, leaving the question of what unites them unaddressed or unresolved. There’s a lot to be said for approaching each tragedy first and foremost as a unique work of dramatic art in its own right. And the temptation to boil them all down to the same generic formula should obviously be resisted. But it would be equally misguided to rule out the possibility of identifying what the tragedies have in common without dissolving the differences between them. For that would mean denying the strong sense most people have, when watching or reading these plays, that there’s something distinctively Shakespearean about their tragic vision that sets them apart from other kinds of tragedy.