Blackwell Reference Online

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All words are pockets into which now this, now that is put, and sometimes many things at once. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow It is upon the pillars of the great tragedies – Hamlet, Othello, King Lear , and Macbeth – that Shakespeare's reputation most securely rests, and indeed it is the tragic plays in general that seem most robustly to confirm Shakespeare's greatness. The tragedies arguably test the emotional resources of their readers and audiences more strenuously than the comedies or histories, confirming a generic bias that Shakespeare's own age often expressed. In the Induction to A Warning for Fair Women (1599), Tragedy, with whip in one hand and a knife in the other, appears on stage to insist upon her supremacy in the repertory: Comedy is but “slight & childish,” designed merely “To tickle shallow iniudiciall eares,” but Tragedy is made of sterner stuff. Its claim to “raigne as Queene/In great Apollos name and all the Muses” (Ind., 75–6) rests upon its ability to present passions that must moue the soule, Make the heart heauie and throb within the bosome, Extorting teares out of the strictest eyes, To racke a thought and straine it to his forme, Untill I rap the sences from their course. This is my office. (Induction, 44–8) And although Comedy aggressively contests Tragedy's claim to generic preeminence, asserting the stultifying predictability ... log in or subscribe to read full text