Tragic wrong human tragedies stranger person kind understands

Text	Once one understands that, it’s much easier to see what the other tragedies have in common with the tragedies of love, and what’s characteristically Shakespearean about them too. Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, the fictional universes they inhabit, and the tragic fates that await them are amazingly diverse. But every one of his tragic protagonists is doomed by having been cast in the wrong role in the wrong place in the wrong time. Every one of them becomes a stranger in a world where they had once felt at home, and a stranger to the person that they used to be or thought they were. And in the process, every one of them reveals the potential they possess to be another kind of person in another kind of world, which they will tragically never live to see. Take, for example, Hamlet: cruelly miscast as a 16th-century prince, bewildered by his inability to sweep to the revenge he has sworn to take, and so alienated from a time he perceives to be ‘out of joint’ (1.5.188) that ‘all the uses of this world’, including sovereignty itself and everything it entails, have become ‘weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable’ (1.2.133–34) to him. Or King Lear: forced to feel what the ‘Poor naked wretches’ (3.4.28) of his kingdom feel; to see the vulnerable human being – ‘unaccommodated man’ (3.4.106–7) – beneath a mad beggar’s rags and his royal robes; and to recognise the systemic injustice and inherent inhumanity of the regime over which he had presided so thoughtlessly for so long. Or Macbeth: the noble warlord who murders a fellow human being for his crown, is tortured by guilt as a consequence, and winds up butchering his way to oblivion, in spite of being, as his own wife attests, ‘too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness’ (1.5.17).

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Once one understands that, it’s much easier to see what the other tragedies have in common with the tragedies of love, and what’s characteristically Shakespearean about them too. Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, the fictional universes they inhabit, and the tragic fates that await them are amazingly diverse. But every one of his tragic protagonists is doomed by having been cast in the wrong role in the wrong place in the wrong time. Every one of them becomes a stranger in a world where they had once felt at home, and a stranger to the person that they used to be or thought they were. And in the process, every one of them reveals the potential they possess to be another kind of person in another kind of world, which they will tragically never live to see.

Take, for example, Hamlet: cruelly miscast as a 16th-century prince, bewildered by his inability to sweep to the revenge he has sworn to take, and so alienated from a time he perceives to be ‘out of joint’ (1.5.188) that ‘all the uses of this world’, including sovereignty itself and everything it entails, have become ‘weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable’ (1.2.133–34) to him. Or King Lear: forced to feel what the ‘Poor naked wretches’ (3.4.28) of his kingdom feel; to see the vulnerable human being – ‘unaccommodated man’ (3.4.106–7) – beneath a mad beggar’s rags and his royal robes; and to recognise the systemic injustice and inherent inhumanity of the regime over which he had presided so thoughtlessly for so long. Or Macbeth: the noble warlord who murders a fellow human being for his crown, is tortured by guilt as a consequence, and winds up butchering his way to oblivion, in spite of being, as his own wife attests, ‘too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness’ (1.5.17).

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