Tragic Instance: The Sequence of Shakespearer's Tragedies & Charismatic Authority in Early Modern English Tragedy and Shakespeare's Tragic Form: Spirit in the Wheel. (Reviews).

Ralph Berry, Tragic Instance: The Sequence of Shakespearer's Tragedies. Newark, DE and Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1999. 228 pp. $39.50. ISBN: 0-87413-685-7.

Raphael Falco, Charismatic Authority in Early Modern English Tragedy. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.x + 243 pp. $39.95. ISBN: 0-8018-6280-9.

Robert Lanier Reid, Shakespeare's Tragic Form: Spirit in the Wheel. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2000. 191 pp. $34.50. ISBN: 0-87413-725-X.

Though in very different ways, each one of these books is concerned with the relationship between the form of and the protagonists in early modern English tragedy, primarily Shakespearean tragedy. In Tragic Instance, Ralph Berry opens by invoking Kenneth Muir's statement -- "There is no such thing as Shakespearian tragedy: there are only Shakespearian tragedies" (11). And yet, as individualized as Berry claims each of Shakespeare's tragedies is, he also finds several loose "groupings" -- related to the chronology of the tragedies' composition -- into which these plays fall (thus the "sequence" indicated by the book's title). The early tragedies (including Richard II and Richard III, whose title pages identify them as tragedies) tend to be deterministic; the four major tragedies offer "intimate studies of the relations between the individual and his fate" (12); and the late tragedies tend toward irony and toward personal emotions. Subsequent chapters move chronologically through the tragedies, saying little mo re about how plays interrelate within a given grouping.

Those already familiar with Berry's many articles and books (The Shakespearean Metaphor and Shakespearean Structures, to name just two) will not be surprised that his approach is mainly formalist and New Critical ("One's critical duty is to describe the play and only the play." [17]). As such, he divides his time between looking closely at language and looking for the larger "logic" of each tragedy. Titus Andronicus presents "fearful slumber" as a guiding metaphor that works to characterize the entire experience of the play as an inescapable nightmare -- a situation triggered by Titus' strict adherence to Roman law and to patriarchal values as the determinants of all actions. In Richard III, the guiding idea is "play," and Richard's tragedy is realized when he understands his failure to win the audience. Antony and Cleopatra turns on "show," this chapter ending with the rather unconvincing claim that in the last scene Cleopatra is a kind of fame-obsessed leading lady and Octavius the director who shrewdly "sp urn[s] the casting couch" (181).

There are a number of chapters that seem to argue rather generally for claims that have been argued in much greater detail by others, e.g., that the sexual bond between the Macbeths is crucial to the play or that there is a homoerotic bond (displayed through warfare) between Coriolanus and Aufidius. There are also a number of chapters that seem to do just the opposite, to go against established views on Shakespeare's tragic heroes. Take, for instance, "Whatever else Hamlet is, he is not an intellectual" (94); or "Lear's system... is perfectly logical" while Cordelia's Act 1 silence is "the grossest of solecisms" (139, 146); or the claim that Othello's tragedy is caused by class conflict between Cassio and Iago. But these chapters are actually among the most interesting as they unsettle the plays in often fascinating and illuminating ways.

Almost everything in this book has appeared in print before, in articles or in Berry's other books. The two wholly new chapters are on Richard II (and this is quite short) and Antony and Cleopatra. Reading the book makes one wish repeatedly for a unifying point, although the author's very thesis is that one cannot find such unity. Also, all of the chapters would have benefited from an updated bibliography (only a smattering of the critical works referenced coming as far forward as the eighties). Berry's voice, however, is authoritative throughout the book, and his close readings are often penetrating -- as, for example, when he examines Hamlet's complicated sense of "identity" in relation to the six major nations of the play.

The central claim of Robert Lanier Reid's Shakespeare's Tragic Form couldn't be further from Berry's. Like Berry, he opens by quoting Muir, but only to reject his point. Reid argues that a common pattern does run through Shakespeare's plays (not just the tragedies, although those are his main focus) and that this pattern is what allows Shakespeare to adapt material from so many different sources to the stage and to succeed with so many dramatic genres. The pattern he describes -- which he calls "form-within-a-form," or later "wheels within wheels" -- consists of three cycles operating within the five-act structure (14, 47). Acts 1 and 2 present one cycle, Act 3 another, and Acts 4 and 5 yet another. Each act ends with a confrontational climax" while each cycle has a "beginning, middle, and end... accented by an intense, repetitive encounter" (23). Furthermore, there is a "major soul-changing event" at the center of each play, in the third act, that makes the ultimate pattern "1 within 3 within 5" (23). But Re id admits that the subtler features of this pattern are both quite complicated and less obvious in certain plays, for reasons he describes.

There are good grounds for skepticism as one approaches Reid's description of how Shakespeare went about choosing his subject matter and source material (who can really know?), and then a description of his compositional process, which goes so far as to spell out the steps Shakespeare took and the "phases" he passed through while composing. For example, as the first step of "Phase 2," "He transformed all characters to fir oppositional moral modes" (45). It's always difficult to think of all of Shakespeare's characters as being one thing or another (so often they're both/and), and one is also left wondering whether imagination is supposed to have entered into Shakespeare's writing process at all. Still, the pattern that Reid identifies is intriguingly evident in the many plays he overviews. He contrasts the festive comedies, whose tendency for social inclusiveness and multiple and/or mirroring plots in some ways obscures and complicates the 2-1-2 pattern, with tragedies that employ the same pattern to highligh t the "insularity" of the protagonist (e.g., Macbeth, Coriolanus). On the other hand, in tragedies of "mutuality" (e.g., King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra) the pattern works more in the manner of the festive comedies, presenting "multiple plots and centers of consciousness" in which the protagonists "move toward a bonding so profound that death seems less a severance than a consummation of a relationship" (56-57).

Once Reid moves away from the technical aspects of the pattern he has identified; away from placing plays, plotlines, and characters into strict categories; and away from analyzing how Shakespeare and Spenser use the terms "soul" and "spirit" differently (a chapter that seems like something of a digression until you get to the last chapter), he offers some rewarding analysis of Macbeth and King Lear. Indeed, these final two chapters (revised versions of earlier published articles) are the best part of the book, for they finally allow one to get a close look at how Reid sees the 2-1-2 scheme working. In slaying Duncan, then Banquo, and then Lady Macduff and her babes, Macbeth performs a kind of suicide of the psyche, slaying first the superego, then the ego, and finally (and most horrifically) the id, the final act "[jeopardizing] the primal psychic ground of being" (122). The opposite of Macbeth, who repeatedly represses epiphanies, Lear experiences three epiphanies that come as he endures three "shamings." T he superego is dismantled in the Act 2 quarrel between Lear and Goneril; the ego is rebuilt with the Act 3 "community of spirit;" and the id is reestablished with Cordelia's "forgiving spirit" in Act 5 (137, 141). My main quibble with these chapters is that the sometimes cited work of "recent critics" often dates back to the sixties and seventies (115, 132).

Raphael Falco's thoroughly researched book is both interesting and important. Drawing on sociological theory (mainly Max Weber's) as well as on past scholarship on the plays and on the plays' sources, Falco traces the phenomenon of the charismatic leader in selected early modern English tragedies. Insisting that the charismatic leader in these plays should not be studied in isolation but rather in the context of group dynamics, the book identifies some paradoxes central to the charismatic experience. For one, the charismatic leader's very authority depends upon the group's investiture of that authoriry, while the group also depends upon the leader: the charismatic group is "at once governing and governed by a symbol of its own grace and power" (7). Also, though charismatic authority is typically initiated in times of crisis and exercised in a revolutionary way, time tends to break down that authority as it becomes less revolutionary, more routine. This breakdown of charismatic authority is at the very heart o f the tragic experience in the plays Falco examines. Since charismatic protagonists tend to be seen -- and/or to characterize themselves -- as having supernatural abilities and mythic appeal, for them "tragedy might be seen as a fall into ordinary social life" (25).

Tamburlaine, a warlord of low birth claiming to be divinely called to use violence and disruption to free his followers from traditional authority, is described as having Weberian "pure charisma." In Part 2 of the play, however, he fails to realize how "the routinization of his charismatic movement has diluted the symbolic effect of his physical power" (59), and he makes a fatal error in attempting to pass on his authority to his sons. Chapter 2 gives a nuanced look at how two forms of charisma -- personal charisma and lineage charisma -- conflict with each other not only with the two persons of Richard and Bolingbroke but also within Bolingbroke himself, who walks a fine line between challenging lineage charisma in Richard and appealing to it in his own case for kingship. Another chapter argues that both Hamlet and Othello fail to marshall their own charismatic symbols and thus do not fulfill the charismatic needs of their followers. The argument about Othello is perhaps the least convincing one in the book, as it rests on the point that Othello's charismatic authority has, in a sense, already broken down in the very first scene of the play, where we see that "the group [his officers] conspire to inhibit Othello's... love-making" (as they do again later in Cyprus) (120). It seems to me a stretch to call Iago's conspiracy "the group's" conspiracy, just as it's hard to say that Iago was necessarily ever a true "follower" of Othello. A subsequent chapter on Milton's Samson offers a brilliant analysis of how the renewal of Samson's charismatic status happens at the very moment of his death, with the play's catastrophe. And the final chapter on several early modern Cleopatras goes in a rewarding new direction, examining the way in which Cleopatra operates both with erotic charisma and with lineage charisma. The only slight problem here is that it's sometimes confusing just which version of the Cleopatra story (Daniel's, Shakespeare's, Dryden's, etc.) is being discussed. In sum, both this chapter and the book itself a re well worth study for their originality and cogency.