Shakespeare's Tragedies

In a lively personal voice, the renowned teacher and scholar Robert N. Watson illuminates the majestic beauties and subtle insights of Shakespeare's greatest works. Shakespeare's Tragedies highlights the plays' evocations of human psychology, and their astonishingly prescient anticipations of modern crises and ideas. Building from a helpful introduction of each tragedy to fresh advanced interpretations, this book reveals what these famous plays can offer every person and generation that must confront both the world's most tragic aspects and their own flawed but wondrous humanity.

Shakespeare's Tragedies explores - among other things - not just the dreamy romance, but also the lurking anxieties about sexual violence haunting Romeo and Juliet that Juliet must heroically overcome; and how it marries comedy to tragedy, showing love and death as inextricable from each other. It explains Hamlet's lasting worldwide fame, how that play speaks to our Information (and Disinformation) Age, and why the usual understanding of the most famous six syllables in all of literature - "To be or not to be" - is misguided and even dangerous. Tracing the intertwined roles of race, religion, and sexuality in Othello, Watson explores the deep roots of villainy, and shows how the play articulates the tragic costs of believing that love (from a deity or a fellow-human) must be bought or deserved, rather than embraced as a miracle. The book then shows King Lear amplifying that last warning, and undermining our complacent certainties, with an ending so multiply shocking that it was hidden for 150 years. Finally, it demonstrates how the verbal details of Macbeth produce its psychological intensity and its relentlessly haunting aura, while also teaching environmentalist lessons and lamenting the inescapable double-bind of our ambitions, as individuals and as a species.

Nearly 500 enrolled students regularly filled Harvard University's biggest classroom for years to hear Professor Watson explore Shakespeare's plays, and his courses at UCLA remain similarly packed, because he reveals, in accessible and exciting ways, why people across centuries, nations, belief-systems, social classes, races, and sexualities continue to treasure these works.