Among the different definitions of tragedy, the most commonly proposed is: a play which deals - at the most uncompromising level - with human suffering, or pathos, death being the usual conclusion. According to Aristotle's Poetics, the purpose of tragedy is to show how humans are at the mercy of fate and to purify the audience by provoking extreme emotions of pity and terror. Tragic actions on the dramatic stage make the audience feel these extreme feelings which eventually cause catharsis or release of these emotions, reducing these passions to a healthy and balanced proportion. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay However, the application of this definition to Renaissance tragedy is limited because it makes two excessive assumptions about the play, its protagonists, and the audience. . First, the deaths of all the protagonists contributing to the drama are tragic to the same degree, which elicits an equal level of catharsis in the audience. Does the self-purchased death of a Faustus who is both erudite and overly ambitious require as much catharsis and empathy as the “useless” deaths of Cordelia, Gloucester, Lear, the Duke of Castile, Horatio and Isabel among a host of others? innocent characters whose corpses litter the sets of King Lear and The Spanish Tragedy? We are left with a terrifying uncertainty – even if the wicked die, the good die with them. Second, and perhaps most importantly, this catharsis would spill over into the audience if the play's denouement – ​​meaningful or not – contained fatal twists, surprise deaths and large-scale massacres. In other words, even though the play itself may have ended physically, the repercussions of these deaths, its implicit message about human destiny, and the deeper, unresolved psychological issues that tormented the minds of the protagonists continue to play out. disturbing the audience long after they have left the room. theaters.The deaths of Lear and Cordelia in King Lear confront us like a raw, fresh wound as our every instinct calls for healing and reconciliation. This problem is moreover as much of a philosophical order as of a dramatic effect. In what kind of universe, we ask, can unnecessary death follow suffering and torture? If characters such as Lear, Gloucester, and Edmund all go through a process of awakening, why then do they die? Even Iago, for all his evil machinations, continues to live to bear the fruit of his crimes. In other Shakespearean tragedies, such as Othello and Hamlet, the play ends with the reconciliation of the tragic hero and society. When Othello pleads, “Speak of me as I am.” Nothing extenuating, nor anything written in wickedness,” like Hamlet and Cleopatra, he seeks immortality in his reputation and in his history. It's a final attempt to come to terms with society and its wrongdoings, moments before he stabs himself. In Romeo and Juliet, there is a sense of hope in the final scene as Houses Montague and Capulet are finally at peace with each other, and will erect monuments in remembrance of the two lovers. Peace and understanding are born from tragedy. But in The Spanish Tragedy, the only monument we see is that of a pile of corpses sprawled behind a curtain. In the end, it is difficult for the audience to feel if anything has been gained other than a feeling of remorse and misery. In a Christian setting, even the worst act can be forgiven through the redemptive power of Christ. So, as terrible as Faustus' pact withLucifer, the possibility of redemption is always open to him. But whenever the play offers moments where Faustus can choose to repent, he decides to remain loyal to Lucifer rather than seek heaven. “Christ actually called the thief to the cross,” he comforts himself, referring to the story of the thief who was crucified alongside Jesus Christ, repentant for his sins, and promised a place in paradise. The fact that he compares himself to this character shows that Faustus assumes that he can wait until the last moment and still escape hell. In other words, he wants to give up Mephistopheles, but not right away. We can easily predict that his desire to procrastinate will prove fatal. It is only at the end of his life that Faustus desires to repent, and in the final scene he cries out to Christ to redeem him. But it is too late for him to repent. In creating this moment where Faustus is still alive but unable to be redeemed, Marlowe departs from the Christian worldview in order to maximize the dramatic power of the final scene. Having inhabited a Christian world throughout the play, Faustus spends his final moments in a slightly different universe, where redemption is no longer possible and certain sins can no longer be forgiven. The effect of inhabiting such an unforgiving universe before one's death is, however, enhanced in later versions of the text. The ending of text B of Doctor Faustus is very different from that of text A. The latter ends simply with Faustus being dragged away by the devils and with a summing up epilogue. Nothing is revealed to the public about what ultimately becomes of his body. Text B is, however, slightly more reassuring. Despite his self-aggrandizement, his hesitations, his "breathtaking quotes and misquotations of Scripture", Faustus gets a sympathetic ear to listen to his anguished confession of his pact with Lucifer, and subsequently "a due burial" from scholars. His scattered members are gathered together by the scholars, who promise him a burial in accordance with Christian rights, “although the end of Faustus is such”. Unlike Don Andreas in The Spanish Tragedy, the proper funeral rites will allow Faustus to travel in Charon's boat across the Styx to Hades. In comparison, the death of King Lear breaks all dramatic conventions. It is perhaps one of the rare tragedies in which the tragic hero dies irreconcilable and indifferent to society. The final two acts of King Lear are constructed with a series of advances and repudiations of visions of hope. By choosing to set King Lear in a pre-Christian era, long before Christ's redemption, Shakespeare does not offer us the comfort of knowing that all evil, no matter how great, can be overcome. Nature seems to mock Edgar's faith in justice, when he sees his father brutally blinded immediately after asserting that "the worst is not / As long as one can say 'this is the worst'" . In Hamlet, a play also torn apart by a self After an all-consuming family feud, Horatio witnesses the drama that ensues. In the final scene, he volunteers to go out and tell the world about the misfortunes that befell this once noble family. He will reveal all “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts” as well as “accidental judgments” and “casual massacres” so that men can learn from their mistakes. Hamlet's audience is thus rewarded with a certain liberation after this heartbreaking tragedy. The world will know that Hamlet was a righteous man. But what will the world think of Lear? Even though it is a symbolic act, no one will tell their story and, in a way, purge themselves of further adversity. Consequently, a strong feeling of guilt andremorse, which in reality should have been the burden of the remaining characters, is instead passed on to the audience. But this doesn't seem to happen in King Lear, The Spanish Tragedy or The Doctor. False. No one steps forward to offer a closing word or perhaps a glimpse of optimism. Kyd's decision to literally give revenge the last word in his play reflects the thematic message of the final scenes of The Spanish Tragedy: revenge indeed has the last word, crowding out mercy and all other human emotions, seeking its inexorable satisfaction in an overdose of bloodshed and violence. The final scene implies that Hieronimo's action serves the achievement of justice, but the blood, waste, and carnage of the penultimate scene work against this presumption, seeming to deny the possibility of justice in a world where the machinations of class and power determine the course of men's lives. In King Lear, Edgar simply suggests: “Say what we feel, not what we should say.” Although sensible, his comment is ill-timed because if this maxim had been observed by everyone and not just Cordelia and Kent, perhaps the tragedy could have been avoided. Perhaps for these reasons Tolstoy calls the plot of King Lear "stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, grandiloquent, vulgar, tedious and full of incredible events, "wild ravings", "jokes without joy", of anachronisms, insignificances, obscenities, hackneyed stage conventions and other defects, both moral and aesthetic. » This could well be a point of view shared by Nahum Tate which made him return closer to Shakespeare's sources, in terms of the outcome. Texts like the Chronicles of Holinshed, which Shakespeare had at his side when he wrote his history plays, result in the reconciliation of a father who subjects his daughters to a “test of love”. Shakespeare's choice to end the play in such a grisly bloodbath can therefore be seen as a clear attempt to highlight the weakness of humanity and the evil of which it is capable. In King Lear, Shakespeare does not just adapt his sources, he consciously makes a violent and shocking alteration. He converts the popular tales of medieval literature into a more complex narrative, where everything is obscure and debatable, like the outcome itself. (Hieronimo is at least partly aware of and quick to exploit the audience's inability to understand tragedies of such magnitude when he chooses to perform his play in a mixture of foreign languages, of which Balthazar rightly notes: " ...this will be a mere confusion/And it is unlikely that we will all be understood." ) The deaths in Hamlet are curiously unrelated to the demands of the Ghost. And the latter, contrary to tradition, does not return to haunt the scene at the end to rejoice in the deaths and not in the doubtfully obtained revenge. Hamlet's decision not to kill Claudius is indeed a considered error, a missed opportunity that would not only have ended the play in less than half the time, thus preventing the deaths of so many, but would also have rightly earned his revenge. While Hieronimo deliberately goes to his final appointment as an agent of death (“And princes, here now is Hieronimo, /Author and actor of this tragedy.”). Hamlet almost stumbles upon his last best chance to kill Claudius following a duel with Laertes and various poisonous plots he previously knew nothing about, so his final act of murder is almost instinctive and rather motivated by self-defense . than expected. Unlike Hamlet, in The Spanish Tragedy, the chorus singer Don Andreas is quick to take the lead