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THERE IS a theory we are all taught sooner or later-usually sooner-about the coming to self-knowledge of the heroes of Shakespeare's tragedies. It says that the hero eventually arrives at a true self-recognition. And this is proper, the theory holds, because the end of a play is the end and because the hero is the hero. He discovers what has happened to him, and learns how far his character is implicated in his fate. Remorse or reflection has its place here: the agent unmasks himself and is startled at what he finds. Some counterpoise of enlightenment is thus offered against the wrenching feelings of pity and fear which the audience has shared with the hero.
The attractiveness of the idea may be linked to our desire for an edifying moral after so much violent action - sheer action (as it might seem) but for this final revelation. And it does seem true that the heroes of Shakespeare's tragedies make a sort of discovery near the end. In the speeches that round off Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, they find words to register their change of view, words that often seem to teach over their heads.
Tragic self-knowledge has been formalized in many works of literary criticism, but the idea has become a commonplace that belongs to no single inventor. The reason, I think, for its almost perennial currency is that it offers a consolation. How, without some such theory, would we justify the pleasure we take in the fall of a hero from high to low? Our interest might easily strike us as prurient or morbid, as if we were watching for the sake of watching. And it surely cannot be enough to say that we love to see human beings pressed by circumstance and to note their endurance or their failure to endure. That our motives as spectators might be indecent is a thought, however accurate, which we can do nothing with. Besides, the idea of a buildup in tragedy that moves toward a self-recognition has come to seem intuitively right. But where does the intuition come from?
Let me start with the most conspicuous instance Shakespeare offers of a tragic ending in which something appears to have been learned. The hero tells...