The Purgation Of The Hero In Shakespearean Tragedy

The career of the hero in the great tragedies of Shakespeare reveals to the audience not only the limits of a self-assertion that would make itself master of an earthly realm that includes the state, family, and private friendships, but also the utter dependence on a primary Good of these institutions and any individual who would live rightly through them. The hero begins by attempting to make himself master of this realm through one of the great subjective passions, love, honour, ambition, revenge or the like; various subplots trace the same theme, although less comprehensively. The failure of this attempt in the hero and lesser characters then shows the dependence of the individual and of nature on a primary Good. Then the latter part of the play shows the hero or other characters making the great institutions actual or being destroyed in their incapacity to do this. Finally the death of the central characters indicates that only the transition from these instantiations of the Good to the Good is adequate to describe human individuality.