Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy: Four Indirect Routes from Athens to London

Any attempt to study the influence of the ancient Greek con­cept of hamartia upon Elizabethan literature faces an imme­diate and apparently insurmountable objection: neither Aris­totle’s Poetics nor the ancient plays that it describes were widely known or imitated in sixteenth-century England. To be sure, a few university scholars such as Sir John Cheke and Roger Ascham knew and admired the Poetics,and writers with an interest in literary criticism such as William Webbe and Sir John Harington had gathered bits and pieces of Aristotelian theory from the Italians.^[1] Moreover, the best-schooled Elizabethans would have encountered plays by Euripides and Sophocles in the grammar schools and universities, though commonly in Latin translation rather than in the Greek. Yet the direct influence of Attic tragedy upon Elizabethan England does not seem to have been great.^[2] Only one critic of the age, Sir Philip Sidney, displays any considerable, direct knowledge of the Poetics or of the work of Italian neo-Aristotelian critics, and he does not attempt to provide his fellow Englishmen with a coherent discussion of the genre of tragedy as it was practiced in antiquity.^[3] Con­temporary dramatists, who borrow very extensively from Senecan and medieval tragedies, very rarely show the direct influence of Euripides or Sophocles. Thus, it is not sur­prising that scholars have searched in vain for conclusive evidence that Shakespeare knew Aristotle’s Poetics or that he was influenced by any of the ancient plays that it describes.

Yet the paucity of evidence linking Greek and Elizabethan tragedy has not deterred critics from using a whole array of Aristotelian concepts in analyzing Shakespeare. The most famous and influential example is the introductory essay in A. C. Bradley’s book Shakespearean Tragedy, where a number of important Greek ideas slip in almost unacknowledged among the nineteenth-century notions of Hegel. According to Bradley, Shakespearean tragedy always deals with persons of high estate who suffer calamity through a “series of inter-connected deeds” that “leads by an apparently inevitable sequence to a catastrophe. “^[4] Although, elsewhere, Bradley displays an interest in char­ acter that exceeds that recommended by Aristotle, he focuses his definition here upon a unified plot and the decisions of the protagonist. Fate, the will of the higher powers, and bad luck may contribute to the outcome, but the primary cause of the hero’s misfortunes is just what Aristotle requires: a hamartia. Bradley writes of the typical Shakespearean protagonist,

He errs, by action or omission; and his error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin. This is always so with Shakespeare. As we have seen, the idea of the tragic hero as a being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as contributing to his destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw.^[5]

From Aristotle, Bradley also takes another key idea, one that is useful in understanding why the central hamartia is so important. According to Bradley, the characteristic emotions that the genre seeks to arouse are “pity and fear,” and since the sort of action best suited to stir these feelings is one committed in ignorance, the hero must conduct himself “with no conscious breach of right.”^[6]

More recent critics have made explicit the critical assumptions that are implicit in Bradley. Virgil Whitaker has suggested that Shakespeare was writing “quasi-Aristotelian” tragedy,^[7] and Roy Battenhouse has argued for a “baptised” Aristotelianism in the plays. He writes,

Although it is no doubt true that most Renaissance theorists subjugated Aristotle’s principles to those of Horace and to Senecan models, Shakespeare’s own art in tragedy differs from this popular neo-classicism. He seems to have found his way, consciously or sub­ consciously, to a mode of tragedy more fundamentally Aristotelian, and at the same time closer to Chaucer’s psychological realism than to Ben Jonson’s didacticism. Presumably it was by the light of medieval

Christian premises that he enlarged on Aristotle’s poetic.^[8]

Ruth Nevo has employed a modified form of Aristotelian plot analysis on the full range of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and, of course, any number of critics have drawn less systemati­cally on the ideas of the Greeks. One often encounters com­ments on the “fatal error” in a particular play, or on the way in which Shakespeare brings about a “catharsis of pity and fear,” and sometimes these discussions are interspersed with terms for the parts of a “complex” plotthe “complica­tion” of the action, the “turning point” at which the hero experiences unexpected “reversals” and “recognitions,” and the subsequent“ resolution. “^[9] To be sure, one seldom encounters asingle-mindedly Aristotelian analysis, these days; there is nearly always an admixture of later ethical or dramatic theory, and a number of scholars have rejected the Greek paradigm altogether.^[10] But the fact remains that Greek terms still play a vital role—often only partly con­scious—in the minds of a great many critics and teachers of Shakespeare. One can ask most any freshman English class what causes Hamlet to fall, and sooner or later, out of their high-school past, will come the notion of hamartia—albeit usually mistranslated as “tragic flaw.”

I am not concerned, here, with the problem of deciding which plays of Shakespeare can most profitably be interpreted using Greek concepts. It may be that further work in that area would be useful, for many works on the subject have been marred by inattention to the precise meaning of the Greek terms or by a tendency to oversimplify the complexities of Shakespeare’s art. But I leave to others the delicate task of applying the Aristotelian paradigm to Shakespeare.

What interests me is the fact that so many competent critics of Shakespeare still find the Greek notions useful despite the embarrassing fact that we have no evidence whatever of Shakespeare’s direct contact with Aristotle or the Greek tragedians, or even with the neo-Aristotelian critics of the Italian Renaissance. It may be, of course, that the advantages of centering a tragedy on an error occurred to Shakespeare independently, and one may say the same of any one of the other elements in the Greek synthesis. Yet it hardly seems credible that the whole constellation of concepts could be useful in Shakespearean criticism if Shakespeare knew nothing at all about the Greek tradition. The correspondences are not always perfect, but they are tantalizingly numerous and close—as if the pattern of Greek tragedy had somehow reached Shakespeare, but only in faded and wrinkled condition after a long passage through other hands. Just which hands he may have received it from will be the subject of this essay.

In seeking sources from which Shakespeare might have learned the Greek form, it seems to me short-sighted to con­fine our attention to the plays of the ancient Greeks or to the critical treatises of Aristotle and his adherents in six­teenth-century Italy. Greek tragedy was a seminal form; it engendered a great many imitations in other lands and in other genres of literature. The quasi-Aristotelian form that critics have seen in Shakespeare’s plays can, I think, be explained solely on the basis of works in four other forms of literature: Roman tragedy, Greek romance, English romantic epic, and the Italian novelle. Of course, not every work in these genres has direct ties with the Greek tradition of tragedy, and those that do show varying kinds and degrees of Greek influence. Yet the combined effect of various works in these genres would have been sufficient to provide Shakespeare with a very full picture of the sort of tragic plot that Aristotle admired.

In Section I below, shall consider four plays by Seneca and the various ways in which they imitate the Greek genre. I shall also discuss Shakespeare’s early training in the five-act structure of Terentian comedy and what it might have taught him about the structure that Seneca borrowed from the Greeks. In Section 11, I shall take up the narrative genre of Greek romance, concentrating upon the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, and in Section 111, I shall consider an offshoot of the same tradition, Sir Philip Sidney’s romantic epic, the Arcadia. Finally, in Section IV, I shall turn to the novelle of the Renaissance critic and playwright Giraldi Cinthio and to an English play written in imitation of Cinthio, George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra.

A number of the works on the list may seem question­ able, either because they are narrative rather than dramatic, or because they are (by today’s standards) romances or tragicomedies rather than tragedies. Yet we should keep in mind that such objections mean more to us than they would have meant to someone in the Renaissance. As Aristotle points out, Greek tragedy had its origins in a narrative genre, the epic, and both in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, the term “tragedy” was applied to narrative and dramatic works alike. And it was also freely applied to works with happy endings, such as the“romantic” plays of Euripides. As Marvin T. Herrick has shown, most Renais­sance definitions of “tragicomedy” distinguish it from “tragedy” primarily on the basis of the rank of the charac­ters, the seriousness of the action, and the level of the style. Often, the matter of the ending does not even come up.^[11] The difference between modern definitions and those accepted in the Renaissance is suggested by the table of contents to the First Folio, where the patently romantic play Cymbeline is described as a “tragedy.” Therefore, we ought to allow for the possiblilty that narrative works and ones that we would term “romantic” or “tragicomic” may have taught Shakespeare something about tragic form. So long as they have historical ties with the Greek tragedians and show the characteristics that Aristotle set forth in the Poetics, such works deserve our attention.

Before I turn to particular lines of Greek influence, let me clarify the characteristics of the genre that I shall be concerned with. Not all Greek tragedies are alike, and, of course, a good many of them do not satisfy the prescriptions in Aristotle’s Poetics, either because they do not turn upon a central hamartia or because they do not have the sort of characters or plot that he recommends. With these plays I shall not be concerned. I shall concentrate on the substan­tial group of plays by Sophocles and Euripides that do yield to Aristotelian analysis, and for convenience I shall designate these as “hamartia-plays.” In considering the influence of this form of tragedy upon later authors, we must look for more than mere error in the hero’s actions. Error is crucial, but it is usually tied in with a list of other characteristics that define the literary type. As Aristotle sets them forth, they are as follows:

• • the protagonist is better than most men and holds a high station in society. He is of mixed character, being noble (epieikeis) and good (spoudaios), but not alto­gether perfect in his virtue (Poetics, I448al-19, 145468-15, 1453a7-10).
  • the plot is unified in the sense that it involves a sequence of cause and effect in which each incident leads necessarily or probably to the next (1450b21-34).
  • the action has three stages: a “tying up” of complications between the characters (desis), a “shift in for­ tunes” (metabole), and an “untying” of complications (/ysis) (1455b24-32).
  • the plot is “complex” in that the “shift of fortunes” involves sudden scenes of reversal (peripeteia) and rec­ognition (anagnorisis) (I452a12-b8, 1452b30-33).
  • the protagonist falls, not through an evil act of his own or though mere bad luck, but because of a hamartia (1452b34-1453a12).(This leads directly to the reversals in the play and is often the object of discovery in the recognition scene).
  • the action arouses the emotions of pity and fear, which are removed by a process of purgation (catharsis) (1449b24-28).
  • the outcome of the plot need not be unhappy; so long as the hero commits a tragic error in the middle of the plot, it is not essential that he carry it out to the bitter end (1453b27-1454a9).^[12]

To these characteristics we should add one other which is not given much attention in the Poetics but which plays an important part in the genre:

• the action involves the interplay of divine and human wills; the hero’s fatal error is inextricably tied up with the prophecies, commands, or influences of the gods.

As Jan M. Bremer has demonstrated, the concept of hamartia is, for fifth-century Greeks, nearly always associated with the concept of ate, a form of delusion or madness inflicted by the gods. Often, the tragic hero commits an act of hubris, and for this act, the gods mete out punishment in the form of ate, which blinds the hero and leads to his nemesis.^[13] Since one occasionally finds these Greek terms being applied to Shakespearean tragedy, it may be well to keep them in mind as we proceed. A number of Shake­speare’s mature tragedies are about delusion (Macbeth, Julius· Caesar) or about madness (Hamlet, King Lear, and perhaps even Othello, if one counts the “fit” in Act Ill), and they frequently involve supernatural signs and prophecies. As in Greek tragedy, the most profound questions often grow out of the religious elements of the plays, for these raise the question of the justice of the higher powers and the role of human will in relation to divine foreknowledge.

This list does not exhaust everything that one may say about the genre, but it does bring out the concepts most commonly applied to Shakespeare, and for our purposes, it will suffice. With such characteristics in mind, we may turn to the particular routes by which a knowledge of the Greek form reached Shakespeare.

I. Seneca, Terence, and Donatus

The first route by which the ancient Greek form reached Shakespeare is surprising because it is so obvious and so little acknowledged: it came th rough Seneca. Four of the plays ascribed to the Roman dramatist are constructed around a central hamartia and yield quite readily to Aristote­ lian analysis. These are Hercules furens, Hercules Oetaeus, Hippolytus, and Oedipus.

The fact that these plays follow the old Greek pattern seems to have escaped the attention of most of the scholars involved in the debate over Shakespeare’s debt to Greek tragedy. John Crossett once mentioned to me, in passing, that Hercules furens is surprisingly faithful to the philo­sophical and dramatic subtleties of Greek tragedy and that scholars interested in Greek influences upon Shakespeare would do well to take a second look at Roman intermediaries. Unfortunately, however, Seneca has never been carefully examined in this regard, and it is not difficult to see why. In studying Seneca’s influence in England, scholars have naturally emphasized the characteristics of his plays that had the widest impact on Elizabethan drama generally; and, of course, Shakespeare’s fellow dramatists were not particularly interested in the fine points of the Greek hamartia-play. They were more concerned with such things as sensational plots, grand stylistic and rhetorical devices, the role of the chorus, the effect of ghosts and other supernatural agents, and the Stoic morality of the plays. In consequence, modern literary historians have emphasized these points and given too little attention to Seneca’s use of his Greek models.^[14]

Scholars have also tended to oversimplify the similarities between one Senecan play and another. For example, Made­leine Doran has taken the position that Seneca’s protagonists fall because of moral evil or bad fortune, and this is cer­tainly true in several of the most famous plays. But it leaves out of consideration the four in which the calamity arises from unconscious human error. She writes,

The Elizabethans would have found in Seneca, too, a warrant for the villainous hero. His characters are on the whole an unlovely lot. And they are un-Aris­totelian, in having no flaw that can be rightly interpreted in Aristotle’s sense. Medea, Phaedra, Atreus, and Clytemnestra are so possessed by furious passion that they are hardly responsible agents… . The relatively passive Hercules, in Hercules Oetaeus, who merely suffers and commits no crime, is instructive.

. . . Hercules does arouse pity, yet his case is only an exaggeration of that of the other Senecan heroes in that they are all essentially victims of misfortune, a misfortune that drives them to crime.^[15]

Aside from the mistranslation of Aristotle’s term hamartia as “flaw,” the main difficulty with such an evaluation is that it is based (as the list of characters suggests) mainly on plays about deliberate and wicked acts of impiety, such as Agamemnon, Thyestes, and Medea. To show how misleading it is to generalize about Seneca’s accomplishments on the basis of these plays, we need only examine one that turns upon a hamartia. Any of the four would do, but, as John Crossett suggested, Hercules furens is a particularly revealing example.

In the Elizabethan translation of Seneca issued by Thomas Newton in 1581 under the title Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, the play Hercules furens occupied a prominent place. It was the first in the volume, and it was translated with more fidelity than many of the others that followed it. Shakespeare seems to have been impressed, both with the play itself and with the translation, for he echoed its lan­guage in several works (including King John, Hamlet, and Macbeth), and he drew upon its plot in yet another (Richard ///, in which Richard’s extraordinary courtship of Queen Ann seems to be modeled on a similar scene between Hercules’s wife Megara and the tyrant Lycus).^[16] Shakespeare’s evident interest in the play makes it particularly valuable for the present discussion.

Certainly, Hercules does not belong with the “unlovely lot” described by Professor Doran. Throughout the play, there are passages praising him for his labors to drive evil from the earth and to restore peace and justice. He is, in every sense, a hero: the son of Jove himself, the enemy of tyrants, the defender of the innocent. To be sure, at the climax of the play, he uses his bow to kill his own wife and children, and he and others in the play describe this deed variously as a sin (see/us), an act of wickedness (nefas) or a reckless impiety (impietas ferox).^[17] Yet the moral status of the act deserves careful scrutiny.

To understand the killing, one must consider the rela­tionship between Hercules and the gods, particularly his stepmother Juno. Because Jove begot Hercules upon a mortal woman, Juno turned her wrath upon the demi-god and sought to destroy him. To this end, she imposed the twelve famous labors. As Seneca’s play begins, the hero is about to complete the last of his tasks, and the most terrible: to go to Hades, take captive the hell-hound Cerberus, and return to the land of the living. In the long opening speech which serves as a prologue to the play, Juno broods over the failure of her earlier schemes and conceives a new plan. She invokes the Eumenides (or Furies) to make her mad so that, in turn, she may bring madness upon Hercules. Once he has lost his wits, she may then destroy him by turning his invincible hand against his own family. She boasts that, when he draws the bow, she will direct the arrows:

… here present wil I stand,
And that his shaftes goe streyght from bow, I wil direct his hand,
The mad mans weapons will I guide, even Hercles fyg htyng, lo,
At length lie ayde.
(p. 12)

Here, as in many Greek tragedies, a divine power brings ate upon the hero, leading him to commit a terrible hamartia and so bringing about a reversal of his fortunes.

That Seneca was aware of the ancient connection between ate and hamartia is clear from Juno’s initial speech and from others later in the play. When Juno invokes the Eumenides, she also calls up several allegorized figures from Tartarus, and the last of these are Error and Furor. In Newton’s English edition, the latter term is translated “fury,” but, of course, in Elizabethan usage “fury” retained much of the meaning of its Latin cognate: it could denote madness as well as intense anger. In the context of the passage, the suggestion of insanity is reinforced by the term “wood”:

Let hateful hurt now come in anger wood,
And fierce impyety imbrew himselfe
with his owne bloud,
And errour eke, and fury arm’d agaynst
it selfe to fight.
(p. 12, emphasis added)

After Hercules has committed his terrible deed, but before he has regained consciousness, the Chorus once again calls to mind the ancient connection between tragic error and madness, saying to the senseless form of Hercules,

Let errour blynd, where it begun hath, go,
For naught els now but only madnes maye
Thee gyltes make: in next estate it standes
To hurtles handes thy mischiefe not to know.
(p. 44, emphasis added)

Throughout the play, particularly in the last speeches of his father Amphitryon and his friend Theseus (pp. 48-51), the hero is carefully defended from the charge that he is guilty of murder in the death of his wife and children. He has acted in ignorance, under the irresistible influence of a vengeful goddess, and therefore, he is the proper object of our pity and fear. As in many Greek tragedies, the hero has committed an act worthy of the worst moral terms: see/us, nefas, impietas. But these terms apply only to the outward act, not to the inward decision of the hero himself. His ate made the inner act mere hamartia.^[18]

In pointing out the nobility of Hercules and his innocence in the murder of his wife and children, I do not mean to suggest that Hercules bears no responsibility for his deed or that he is impeccably virtuous. If he were, the play would offend our sense of justice or, as Aristotle says, our feelings for our fellow man (philanthropos).^[19] In one sense, of course, Hercules does not deserve to suffer as he does. He is, by and large, an admirable man, and his afflictions are out of all proportion to his moral faults. But in another sense, he does deserve to suffer. He has undertaken a struggle that no man should attempt, a struggle to over-come a goddess, and thus, he bears some responsibility for his own calamity. Here, once again, Seneca accepts—and clearly announces to the audience—an old Greek position about tragedy: the gods do not inflict ate upon the utterly inno­cent, but upon those who commit acts of hubris.

Aristotle defines hubris as an injury or annoyance done simply for the pleasure of seeing someone else disgraced,^[20] and the definition applies to Hercules in his behavior to Juno. In her opening speech, the goddess accuses him of lording his successes over her. Of course, her hostility toward him would have been great, even if he had been humble; but he has made things worse by boasting and by taking a mischievous delight in carrying out her commands simply in order to see her humiliated. His arrogance has transformed her original hostility into blind fury. She says bitterly, “all my wrath he doth injoy and to his greater prayse / He turnes my hates” (p. 10). The key word here is “injoy.” Some lines later she comes to the greatest of his labors, the capture of Cerberus, and once again she is outraged that he should puff himself up at her expense: “[He] even over mee doth triumph lo, and with proude hand about / The foule blacke dogge by Grekish townes he leades from hel away” (pp. 10-11).

As in much of Greek tragedy, the main issue in the play seems to be man’s proper relationship with the gods, and in this context, the hubris of Hercules is not a trivial matter. In fact, Juno predicts that, ultimately, it will lead to an open assault on heaven. Since the hero has conquered Pluto and Juno, and relished their defeat, not even Jove himself can expect to be spared:

The sceptors from his father wil he take,
Nor hee to starres (as Bacchus dyd) his way wil gently make:
The way with ruine will he seeke, and hee
in empty s kyes
Wil reygne alone with force displayd.
(p. 11)

This fear is not entirely a figment of Juno’s brooding imagination. Later, at the very moment when the fatal mad­ ness first comes upon him, Hercules turns against Jove and threatens to lead a rebellion in heaven:

I even the bondes from Saturne wyll undoe,
And even agaynst the kingdome prowde of wicked father loe
My graundsyre loase.Let Titans now prepare agayne their fight
With me theyr captaine raging.
(p. 40)

The difficulty in interpreting this passage is that one cannot be sure who is speaking, Hercules or Juno. Since she has invaded his mind, he is no longer in complete control of his actions. Yet, though Juno may be manipulating his thoughts, she is not, I would argue, forcing him to do something out of character. Throughout the play, he has shown that he is altogether capable of hubris of just this sort. In fact, his rebellion against Jove is simply an extension of an attitude that Hercules has already taken toward Jove’s wife and his brother Pluto. Therefore, it seems fair to say that the hero’s own hubris, not simply bad fortune or the malice of the gods, is the immediate cause of his down­ fall.

The nemesis that follows from the hero’s ate involves just the sort of reversal and recognition that Aristotle recommends for a tragedy: in Act IV of the English translation, Hercules destroys his family, and in Act V, he recovers his wits and learns of his terrible deed. In fact, the entire plot follows a course similar to the five-act structure that under­ lies so many of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The only point that may seem unsatisfactory is that the hero’s hamartia does not precipitate an obvious crisis in Act 111, where classical convention has taught us to expect it.^[21] In fact, the hero hardly appears there at all; he gives three speeches at the beginning of the act and then leaves the stage.

Yet I would argue that the play follows even this convention. Hercules’s brief appearance in Act III is the true crisis of the action, for this is the point at which, in triumph over Juno, he emerges from his conquest of Hades, leading the hell-hound Cerberus. To have brought the monster into the light of day is a terrible impiety, an abomination, and Hercules recognizes that fact. He asks Phoebus to pardon him for bringing forth an “unlawful thing” and bids Jove and the other gods to turn away their eyes:

… who so from hye doth see,
And dreading yet with countnaunce newe the earth defil’de to bee,
Let him from hence turne backe his sight, and face to heaven upholde,
These monstrous sights to shun.
(p. 28)

Following this impiety, Hercules commits the most daring act of hubris prior to his madness. He taunts Juno about his conquest of Hades in these words:

I there coulde raygne[;] the Chaos of eternall nyght of hell,
And woorse then night, the doleful! Gods I have that there doe dwell,
And Fates subdu’de[;] the death contemn’de I am return’de to light.
What yet remaynes?
(pp. 28-29)

Ironically, Juno has prepared her answer. In the next instant, Hercules learns that his family has been abused by Lycus, and the hero sets out to avenge himself upon the tyrant. This decision is fatal, for, in his rage, he mistakes his family for that of Lycus and kills them all. Thus, Hercules does commit his fatal error in Act III. When he next appears, in Act IV, Juno is upon him almost immediately, deluding him and turning his wrath against his family.

I suppose that it should not surprise us to find the pattern of the Greek hamartia-plays reproduced in works such as this one by Seneca. After all, in writing Hercules furens and the other plays that I have mentioned, he could hardly depart very far from the old Greek myths, and the myths themselves were concerned with such things as hubris, ate, and hamartia. Furthermore, Seneca was imitating dramatic texts by Sophocles and Euripides, and the Greek originals were, in all four instances, nearly perfect examples of the form. But all the same, Seneca’s achievement is impressive, for it reveals a thorough appreciation of the delicate interplay of the various elements of the hamartia-play. The hero must be noble but not perfect; the gods must rule but not overrule; they may delude the hero but not violate his character; the central hamartia must not entail deliberate sin but must entail personal responsibility; and the whole action must be so integrated that human choice leads naturally from crisis to reversal, recognition, and calamity. In Seneca, Shakespeare would have found more than a decadent sensationalist, more than a flashy rhetorician given to heavy-handed moralizing in a Stoic vein. He would have found a surprisingly good teacher of Greek tragic art.

To understand fully the impact that these Senecan plays may have had on Shakespeare, we must broaden our view and consider his early exposure to drama generally. The plays that he would have read and analyzed most thoroughly in grammar school were probably those of Terence, and comedies of this sort follow techniques of plotting similar, in several respects, to those that we have seen in Seneca. The similarities arise because of a common Greek ancestry. Roman comedy was generally written in imitation of the Greek New Comedy of Menander, and Menander seems to have learned to design his plots by imitating Greek tragedies, particularly the romantic plays of Euripides.^[22]Thus, although Roman comedy seems to us far removed from the serious works of the Greeks, it would have helped to train the young Shakespeare to recognize the main features of the Greek hamartia-play. By the time that he first read Sene­ca’s works in this form, he had, in all likelihood, already learned to analyze their structure.

Shakespeare’s schooling would have provided him, not only with literary models, but also with critical theories of the sort needed to appreciate them. Elizabethan school editions of Terence typically included a complete critical apparatus by the late classical theorist Donatus. This apparatus included two introductory essays on tragedy and comedy and a fairly extensive set of analytical notes on the plays. In these writings, Donatus constantly refers to such things as the causal connections between incidents in the plot, the tying and untying of complications between the characters, and the resolution of these complications through scenes of reversal and recognition. Even more interesting, however, is his tendency to emphasize the importance of a pivotal error in Act III. In one of the two introductory treatises, for example, we find the following comment on the middle section of the plot, the epitasis: “The epitasisis is the increase and progression of the turbations, and the whole, as I might say, knot of the error.”^[23] This point is rein­forced in the commentaries on particular plays. For example, in his notes on Terence’s Andria, Donatus states that Act 1 II, Scene iv “ties the knot of error of the play and the comic periI.” Then he points out that Act III., Scene iv (the mid-point of the play) is the main scene of “perturba­tions”in which Davus, the schemer who is guiding the action, “has admirably exaggerated his errors.” And finally, he tells us that Act V, Scene iv—the great scene of reversal and recognition—is the place where “the whole error of the play is wholly revealed. “^[24] Although Donatus’s theory is most fully laid out in the commentary on this play, notes on the others suggest that he believes that all Terentian come­ dies turn on an error; and indeed, most of them do.^[25]

We can trace the idea that comedy, like tragedy, centers on an error all the way back to the Greeks. In the Poetics Aristotle defines comedy as an imitation of men who are ridiculous, and by “the ridiculous” he means “a mistake [hamartema] or deformity, not productive of pain or harm” (1449a32-35). By the time Donatus codified the notion of a five-act structure for the Roman drama, it had apparently become a critical commonplace that, both in comedy and in tragedy, Act III. is the most important, for the decisions there prepare for the “untying” of the plot in Act V. Cicero mentions this point casually, as though it was well known.^[26] All that remained for Donatus to add was the recognition that the crucial decision in Act III. is typically an error.

In the writings of Donatus, Shakespeare would have found most of the structural points of the old Greek hamartia-play clearly defined, and what is more, harmonized with the five-act structure that he himself was to adopt in his own tragedies. As T. W. Baldwin has written of Donatus,

He knows some turning-point doctrine at least cognate with Aristotle’s peripeteia from desis to lysis. He expects a single error, solved by a persona ad catas­tropham machinata or some such external mechanism, just as Aristotle forbad a deus ex machina to solve any error which could be solved by the characters themselves. He demands a protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe as Aristotle demanded a beginning, a middle, and an end. He also has a system of anatom­ical division into five acts, whereas Aristotle only named the anatomical parts without putting them into their anatomical relations….It is apparent, therefore, that Donatus is using some Greek system descended from or analogous to that presented by Aristotle in the Poetics.. .. [B]oth Cicero and Terence, as well as Horace and Seneca, reflect an intermediate stage of this evolving Greek theory between Aristotle and Donatus.^[27]

II. Heliodorus

The lessons in tragic plot-design that Shakespeare could have learned from Seneca, Terence, and Donatus would have been reinforced by another ancient form of literature that was also immensely popular with the Elizabethans: Greek romance. For our purposes, the most important work in this kind is the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, which enjoyed a great vogue in the latter. half of the sixteenth century. In Europe, it was printed again and again in Latin, French, Italian, German and Spanish; Jacques Amyot’s French translation alone went through twenty-two printings before Shakespeare’s. death. In Britain, Thomas Underdowne’s translation was printed five times in Shakespeare’s day, and there were many popular imitations by such authors as Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Greene, George Chapman, Barnaby Rich, and William Warner.^[28] Shakespeare knew the work at first hand—probably in the English translation by Underdowne (ca. 1587) or in Amyot’s French version (1547)—and he continued to admire it throughout his career, as we can see from its influence on early plays such as The Merchant of Venice and on late romances such as Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale.^[29] Although the Aethiopica might seem to us too light and romantic to have taught Shakespeare anything about serious tragedy, it is important because Heliodorus learned a number of the formal elements of his art from the Greeks.

The Aethiopica dates from a period at least 600 years after the golden age of Attic tragedy. Yet its author had a notable fondness for the ancient plays, and he alludes to them often, particularly to those of Euripides. The plots of the book bear a strong resemblance to Euripides’s romantic tragedies with happy endings, and this resemblance is all the more significant because Heliodorus continually reminds the reader of theatrical analogies. Again and again, particularly at crises in the action, he goes out of his way to bring in stage terminology and metaphors likening the plot to that of a play.^[30] For instance, at the catastrophe of the story of Calasiris, which involves a battle fought by two sons in the presence of their own father, we find the following passage (in Underdowne’s translation):

[I] n the sight of the whole citie who looked upon them, and was judge of that controversie, either a God, or some manne [sic] of fortune which governeth humane affayres, by a newe devise augmented that that was doone, and in a manner beganne a newe tragedie like the other, and made Calasiris a fellow of their course, and a beholder of the unhappy battaile of his children for life and death, at the same day and hower, as if it had bene devised of sette purpose before.^[31]

In Amyot’s French version, the comparisons with a play are even clearer:

Estant tout le peuple de Memphis espandu surles murailles de la ville aux creneaux, ne plus ne moins que dedans un theatre, pour voir ce spectacle, alors la fatale destinee des dieux, ou bien la fortune, qui que soit celle qui gouverne et dirige les choses humaines, va susciter une entree de nouvelle trag­ edie, comme si elle eust voulu mettre en avant le commencement et argument d’une autre seconde, pour la faire jouer au parangon de la premiere, et fist que le bon homme Calasiris se trouva ce mesme jour, et en ce mesme instantd’heure,comme sielle l’y eust transporte avecq’ quelque engin, et quelque machine, tout a propos et a temps, pour courir quant et ses deux enfantz.^[32]

In similar passages throughout the book, Heliodorus reminds the reader of the “tying up” of the plot (ploke), the reversals (metabole), the recognitions (aneuresis, anagnorismos), the direct interventions of the gods, the destiny of the hero (moira), the introduction of characters merely to resolve complications in the plot (kathaper ek mechanes), and the tragic emotions aroused in the spectators. A whole theory of tragedy is implicit, not only in the design of the plots, but also in the use of stage terminology and metaphors.

Heliodorus’s reliance on the method of plotting developed by the Greek tragedians may be seen by examining one of the several tragic stories interwoven in the romance. A plot line that might have been of special interest to Shake­speare is the story of Calasiris and his two sons, for this was Sir Philip Sidney’s model in the story of the Paphlagonian King (New Arcadia, Book 11, Chapter 10), which in turn became the principal source for the Gloucester sub-plot in King Lear.

The plot is as follows: Calasiris, the High Priest of Memphis, falls in love with a renowned courtesan named Rhodopis. Although he contains his desire and remains faithful to his priestly vows of chastity, he soon suffers a misfortune that he regards as a divinely ordained punishment for his impure thoughts. His powers as a prophet enable him to foresee that his sons, Thyamis and Petosiris, are destined to clash in armed conflict, and he is to witness the battle. To avoid the further temptations of Rhodopis and to avoid seeing his own sons fight, he flees to the temple at Delphos, where he serves the gods in exile.

This act brings about the web of complications on which the crisis of the tragedy depends. After the departure of Calasiris, the high priesthood is supposed to pass to his elder son, Thyamis, but Petosiris manages to seize the office, and his brother is forced to challenge him to single combat in order to regain it. Meanwhile, Calasiris receives at Delphos an oracle warning him that he cannot prevent the spinning of the Fates and prophesying that he will return to his native Egypt. After a series of adventures, he arrives in Memphis on the very day that his sons are to do battle. In the disguise of a beggar, Calasiris observes the combat and, at its climax, reveals himself to his sons. After this surprising scene of recognition, he reverses the course of the action by reconciling his sons and returning to Thyamis the office of High Priest.

The hamartia upon which the action turns is Calasiris’s mistake in trying to evade the prophecy that he will witness the battle between his sons. He is quite aware that, as the regent Philanax says in Sidney’s Arcadia, oracles are either superstitious and thus vain or else true and thus infallible. In either case, trying to avoid them is foolish. Nonetheless, Calasiris flees, and he does not recognize his error until the chain of events leads him back to Memphis on the very day that his sons are to do battle. The error is ideal for a tragedy, since his original departure from Memphis was the act that set off the entire sequence of the plot, and his rec­ognition of his mistake comes at the very moment when the final reversal of fortunes brings the plot to a close. As in Sophocles’s Oedipus, the attempt to avoid tragedy leads to tragedy. Or so, at any rate, we may say so long as we accept Aristotle’s opinion that a tragedy may end happily.

Behind the various misfortunes of Calasiris and his sons lies the ancient Greek scheme of divine justice. The old man recognizes that, as soon as he entertained a desire for Rhodopis, he fell into a state of tragic delusion or ate. He says that the god Saturn “cast his eye into our house” and sent a delusion in the form of Rhodopis: “I understoode that a woman shoulde bee the beginning of all the ill luck which the Goddes had appointed me, of which I was not ignorant before, and perceived that by fatal! destinie it was so decreed, and that the God [Gr. daimon], whose turne it was then to rule, woulde playe that parte [i.e., the part of Rhodopis].”^[33] Note that the daimon is likened to a character in a play. As in Euripides’s Bacchae, a god has taken on human form in order to afflict the hero with ate.

The delusion which prompts Calasiris to depart from Memphis is tragic in the best Greek fashion. On the one hand, we may feel pity and fear for him, for the gods have afflicted him with ate for an apparently minor offence: his unfulfilled desire for a courtesan. On the other hand, Calasiris has brought tragedy upon himself through his ill-considered decision to flee from Memphis. As the story unfolds, the reader undergoes a gradual purgation of whatever pity and fear he may have felt. We see, not only that the old man is responsible for his own suffering, but also that the cause of justice has been served by the entire train of events. The wicked ambitions of Petosiris have been brought to light and thwarted; Thyamis has proven himself and gained honor as the new High Priest; and Calasiris’s journey to Delphos has allowed him to play a part in saving the lives and securing the happiness of the lovers in the main plot of the romance. When the old man experiences his final, emotional discovery on the battlefield in Memphis, the catharsis is complete.

In other parts of the romance, Heliodorus leaves the clear impression that he is consciously striving to achieve this sort of release from pity and fear. In the main plot, there is a passage in which the author discusses the tragic emotions and the effect of a dramatic recognition scene, this time one in which the identity of the main heroine of the book is discovered. Calasiris learns of her identity through an old letter and describes his reactions thus:

After I had read this, … I knewe what she was, and marveyled greatly at the governance of the Goddes, and was full of pleasure and sorrowe, and altogether newly affected, weeping and laughing at once, my minde now became gladde for the knowing of that whereof I was ignorant before, and for remembring that which was answered by the oracle, but very much troubled for that which was to come, and had great pittie and compassion of the life of man, as a thing very unstable and weake.^[34]

Note that Calasiris feels the Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear: he is “troubled” by future danger and filled with “compassion” at the instability of human life. Yet these emotions have been superseded by another set of emotions “altogether newly affected”: a sense of gladness at dispelled ignorance and a feeling of wonder at “the governance of the Goddes.” Clearly, some sort of catharsis has taken place. The purgation does not seem to be complete, since Calasiris goes on to say that he continues to feel fear and pity, but, of course, his case is special: his story has not reached its end, and trials and uncertainties still lie ahead. The point seems to be, however, that pity and fear have abated as a consequence of new understanding and religious awe.

If Shakespeare read passages such as this one closely, then he knew something of the way in which the tragic emotions described in the Poetics are supposed to pass away during a recognition scene. Incidentally, he would also have found here a third tragic emotion that he brings up, along with pity and fear, in his own plays: a sense of wonder,^[35] brought out here when Calasiris comments that he “marveyled greatly at the governance of the Goddes.”

Of course, there is no way to be sure that Shakespeare would have noted the sort of details that I have been pointing out. Yet he was used to finding the ingredients of a good tragic plot in all kinds of sources, and he could hardly have missed the stage metaphors that serve as constant reminders that Heliodorus was following the conventions of serious drama. It seems reasonable to suppose, then, that Shakespeare would have noticed a family resemblance between Heliodorus’s plots and the ones by Terence and Seneca that he had been taught to analyze in grammar school.

III. Sidney

There is yet another reason to think that Shakespeare would have taken seriously the tragic potential of Hellenistic romance: the most influential English author of the late sixteenth century, Sir Philip Sidney, had explored that potential in his romantic epic, the Arcadia, and Shakespeare had studied Sidney’s book with care. The influence of the Arcadia is evident, not only in Shakespeare’s late romances, but also in at least two of his mature tragedies: Julius Caesar and King Lear.^[36] Since Sidney was one of the few Elizabethans who had encountered the Greek genre in a variety of sources, the tragic plot-lines in the Arcadia deserve scrutiny as a third set of intermediaries between the Greeks and Shakespeare.

The style of plotting in the Arcadia is indebted to Heliodorus more than to any other author, and Sidney has also picked up Heliodorus’s habit of using theatrical terminology and stage metaphors to remind the reader of the similarities between his stories and stage tragedies. In the edition of 1593, there are more than thirty passages in which Sidney describes one plot line or another as if it were a tragic play. These passages give us a great many clues about Sidney’s critical assumptions on such matters as the emotions of tragedy, the proper character of its protagonists, the importance of a central error, and the function of various elements of the “complex” plot. An earlier version of the text, the Old Arcadia, is divided into five sections entitled “Books or Acts,” which are arranged according to the five-act structure of Terentian comedy. The revised version, entitled the New Arcadia, departs from this struc-ture, but it incorporates more than twenty plot lines about the fall of noble characters, and a majority of these yield to Aristotelian analysis.^[37] In short, what Shakespeare might have observed in the Aethiopica would have been seconded in the Arcadia, and sometimes in plots of a more serious nature.

Yet Sidney must be considered apart from Heliodorus because his knowledge of the Greek tradition came from a number of sources besides the Aethiopica. As we can see from Sidney’s influential critical treatise, An Apology for Poetry, he had studied the Poetics with some care, even consulting the original Greek text. He had also read several of the sixteenth-century Italian critics, including J. C. Scal iger, Antonio Minturno, and perhaps Lodovico Castelvetro, and from their treatises—particularly those of Minturno—he could have arrived at a very thorough understanding of Aristotle.^[38] Finally, Sidney may have seen productions by playwrights involved in the Greek revival in sixteenth-century Italy, and he certainly knew the work of the contemporary Scotsman George Buchanan, who had written two Latin hamartia-plays, one an adaptation of Euripides’s Alcestis and the other a recasting of the Biblical story of Jephthah.^[39]

From sources such as these, Sidney learned to de- sign narrative plots that could easily be recast as hamartia­ plays—at least if one were willing to disentangle them from the complex web of action and episode that Sidney thought appropriate when he redesigned the Old Arcadia as an epic. For simplicity, let me confine my attention to a brief but representative tale told along the way: the story of Queen Helen in Book I.

In the course of this tale, which is barely six pages long, Sidney twice mentions its resemblance to a play. At the climax of the action, the protagonist, Queen Helen of Corinth, remarks that “Though my hart be stage for Tragedies; yet I must confesse, it is even unable to beare the miserable representation thereof. “^[40] And later, she says of a servant who witnessed the bloody outcome of the action, “a fitter messenger could hardly be to unfold my Tragedie: I see the end, I see my ende” (p. 74).Clearly, Sidney is alluding here to the ancient stage convention that a messenger should relate the violent outcome of a tragedy. Such passages remind the reader that Sidney was consciously shaping his tale along the lines of a classical play, and indeed, not even Aristotle could have asked for a better illustration of tragic plotting—at least in so far as it may be embodied in a prose narration.

The heroine is of the right sort for such a tragedy. Sidney praises Queen Helen for her “wisdome & good nature” and for a host of other princely virtues (see pp. 64 and 283). But she is not perfect. She admits that she first came to the throne “before that my age was ripe for it” (p. 66). and since then she has procrastinated in the important matter of choosing a husband. She has had an abundance of noble suitors, but she has been more inclined to enjoy their attention than to return it. In fact, she has developed a certain hubris toward her suitors and toward the goddess of love. Sidney tells us that she thought it “foule scorne” to marry, and later in the book, he describes her as “a Diana apparelled in the garments of Venus” (p. 283). Helen’s hubris sets the stage for her tragedy, for it leads to ate and eventually to nemesis. Like so many classical figures who scorn the goddess of love and her servants, the Queen soon feels the power of Venus over her own heart. She falls in love—blindly, foolishly, hopelessly—and her infatuation leads to disaster.

The plot of the story is tightly knit and “complex,” and it proceeds in the following stages.  First comes a knot of complications. The suitor whom Helen likes best, a nobleman named Philoxenus, realizes that his love is not being returned, and in an attempt to soften Helen’s heart, he enlists his friend Amphialus to woo her in his behalf. So eloquent is Amphialus, and so blessed with manly virtue and refinement, that he immediately wins the heart of the Queen. But not for Philoxenus. Helen falls in love with Amphialus himself.

Once the characters are entangled in this way, the plot builds swiftly to a crisis. For a time, the Queen allows Amphialus to believe that her interest is all in Philoxenus, for she fears that, once Amphialus realizes the truth, he will do the honorable thing and withdraw from court. Yet she cannot allow the ruse to go on forever, and near the mid­ point of the story, she decides to reveal her love to Amphialus. He, of course, is horrified at the dilemma in which he finds himself, and he is so anxious to put the problem behind him that he makes the mistake of leaving Corinth without explaining his reasons to Philoxenus.

This action sets the stage for the Queen’s fatal error. Soon after the departure of Amphialus, Philoxenus comes to visit Helen, and in her sorrow and vexation, she lashes out at him. As he renews his suit to her “with humble gesture, and vehement speeches,” she deliberately wounds him, thus committing the act of hubris that ultimately ruins her. She later explains that “the froward paine of mine owne harte made me so delight to punish him, whom I esteemed the chiefest let in my way; that … I told him, that I would heare him more willingly, if he would speake for Amphialus, as well as Amphialus had done for him” (p. 70). This act of hubris, this momentary “delight to punish” a man who loves her and has done her no wrong, is her fatal error. It enrages Philoxenus and leads him to the false conclusion that his best friend has betrayed him. Without speaking another word, he sets out to find Amphialus and to challenge him to a duel.

As he rushes from the palace, the Queen has a momen­tary misgiving, a passing glimpse of her terrible error. She says,

straight my heart misgave me some evill successe: and yet though I had authoritie inough to have stayed him (as in these fatal! things it falles out, that the hie-working powers make second causes unwittingly accessarie to their determinations) I did no further but sent a foot-man … to follow him, and bring me word of his proceedings. (p. 70)

There are two points to note in this speech. First, Helen is not guilty of a conscious act of evil; she bears responsibility for what is to come, but only in the sense that she has set events in motion and should have known better. She is deluded, perhaps negligent, but not consciously bad. Second, her will is not entirely her own; she is in the control of “hie-working powers” that have made her a “second cause unwittingly accessarie to their determinations.” One could hardly ask for a clearer statement of the ancient notion of ate or of the religious paradox that underlies so much of Greek tragedy, lending it grandeur, wonder, and irony.

The turning point and the subsequent “untying” of the plot come when Philoxenus overtakes his friend in the woods. Amphialus tries bravely to ward off his sudden attack without bloodshed, but an accidental blow from Amphialus’s sword strikes the young man down. This is the sudden reversal of fortunes that begins the unraveling of the plot, and it is accompanied by a scene of recognition. Before Philoxenus dies, he has just enough time to tell Amphialus that Helen has provoked the attack. When Amphialus hears this, he turns all his bitterness upon the Queen, vowing that, if she ever approaches him again, he will kill her. The tragic effect of this conclusion is heightened by several secondary errors that have resulted from the primary error of the Queen. Philoxenus dies thinking that Amphialus has betrayed him, and Amphialus leaves Corinth thinking that Helen has deliberately set Philoxenus against him. Thus, ate rules to the end. Whereas at the outset there had been a triangle of love, at the end there is a triangle of blind and mistaken hatred, and all because Helen made her fatal declaration of love.

If we consider the fall of Helen from a purely human point of view, then it seems appropriate to respond with the emotions that Aristotle prescribes for tragedy. To fall in love with someone unattainable and to lash out angrily at another who stands in the way is altogether human and understand-able, and to suffer as Helen does for these reactions ought to provoke our pity and fear. Indeed, there is evidence throughout the Arcadia that Sidney knew this formula and, with one important modification, accepted it.^[41] Yet, if we take the point of view of the higher powers, then these emotions are likely to abate, for Helen has scorned the divine power of love and injured a lover precisely at the moment when he most needed gentle handling. In short, if we follow Helen’s suggestion and consider with the mind of the gods, the story points us in the direction of catharsis.

IV. Cinthio and Whetstone

Like Sidney, the last two authors on my list were exposed to Greek principles of tragic design in a variety of ways. Giraldi Cinthio learned of it through direct study of Aristotle, through training in the structure of Terentian comedy, and through exposure to the nee-Aristotelian movement in Renaissance Italy. George Whetstone learned of it by imitating the work of Cinthio and also by studying the five-act structure of Roman comedy.

Cinthio has sometimes been classified as a Senecan, and it is true that he held the Roman dramatist in high regard, praising him above “all the Greeks who ever wrote” for such things as prudence, decorum, majesty, and moral sentences. Cinthio’s own plays reveal some of the rant, the philosophical moralizing, and the fatalism of Seneca. But Cinthio was also thoroughly schooled in the Poetics, and his preferences in plot-design were largely Aristotelian.^[42]

The extent of the Greek influence is apparent in his principal theoretical treatise, Discorso sulle comedie e sulle tragedie(1543;published,1554).There, the dramatist argues for tragic heroes who are somewhere between the perfectly good and the bad. Mixed characters of this sort are “in every way deserving of some penalty, but not of one so heavy [as they suffer]. And this justice, combined with the weight of the penalty, induces that horror and that compassion which is necessary to tragedy.“^[43] In accordance with these Aristotelian views on the characters and emotions of tragedy, Cinthio also advocates that the central action be a hamartia. Tragic heroes ought to resemble Sophocles’s Oedipus in so far as he acts in “ignorance of the sin committed” (p. 255). A central error is crucial because it alone can arouse in the audience the greatest feelings of pity and fear, and it also acts to “purge” similar errors from the minds of the spectators. A member of the audience will say to himself, in effect, “If the tragic character has suffered as severely as he does because of an involuntary error, what would happen to me if I should voluntarily commit such a sin?” (p. 255). This last explanation of the Greek concept of catharsis goes well beyond the text of Poetics, but it reveals the extensive influence of Aristotle upon Cinthio’s thought, particularly in his belief that tragedy must arise from hamartia. Later in his treatise, Cinthio suggests that the best sort of plots are those that lead to death or torments among relatives, and in that passage he blames both Seneca and Euripides for presenting characters such as Medea who harm their kin “not in error but voluntarily.” A tragic hero must not act “with full knowledge of the conditions” (p. 257). Finally, Cinthio accepts the arguments in the Poetics in favor of a “complex” plot, and though he often takes the liberty of advocating an action with two strands rather than one, he assumes that each will proceed from complications to sudden reversals and recognitions (pp. 254-57).

By and large, the construction of Cinthio’s own tragic plays and tales conforms with his theories. In the plays, he typically follows the five-act structure of Terentian comedy, making much of the final reversals and recognitions.^[44] Like Seneca and the Greek tragedians, he sometimes employs plots that do not turn upon a hamartia, but in fully half his plays, he follows the Aristotelian pattern. These include A/tile, Selene, Gli Antivalomeni, Epitia, and Didone.

In the novelle, too, Cinthio sometimes followed the out­ lines of the ancient hamartia-play. In fact, his collection of prose tales entitled Hecatommithi (published in 1565 but composed earlier) served as a rich quarry from which he mined nearly all the plots for his plays. For our purposes, his achievements in the novelle are particularly important because Shakespeare and his fellow Elizabethans were much better acquainted with the Hecatommithi than they were with the plays. Othello is based almost entirely upon Cinthio’s tale of an unnamed Moor and Disdemona (Decade III, Story 7), and Measure for Measure derives mainly from Whetstone’s play Promos and Cassandra, which was, in turn, based on Cinthio’s story of Epitia (Decade III, Story 5).^[45]

What Shakespeare found in the work of Cinthio and his imitator Whetstone was a secularized version of the Greek hamartia-play, stripped entirely of Greek theology and myth, and, in the case of Promos and Cassandra, transformed into tragicomedy, involving both high and low characters, serious and ludicrous action. The structure remained, but the scheme of divine justice and the stature of the heroes had changed. At least in the works that Shakespeare imitated directly, we do not find these authors taking any interest in the progression from hubris to ate and nemesis. The plots involve no prophecies, no paradoxes of divine foreknowledge and human free will, no direct interventions by the higher powers. The characters fashioned by Cinthio and Whetstone are Renaissance aristocrats who generally fall because of complications in their domestic lives; they are not legendary heroes who face cosmic questions about god and man. Admittedly, both authors make a point of emphasizing poetic justice, and they both assert a providential order in which the wicked are punished and the virtuous are redeemed. In fact, their interest in asserting this moral leads them to favor happy endings that seem to us more proper in romance than in serious tragedy. But here their interest in divine justice ends. They do not face the hard cases that fascinated the Greeks—stories in which simple human error pro­duces terrible and unmitigated calamity and the justice of the higher powers comes into question.

Yet the outlines of the old Greek style of plot remain, and the works are successful in arousing the tragic emotions. The Moor murders his beloved wife because, in the middle of the action, he draws a mistaken inference about several of her actions, particularly her loss of a handkerchief. Epitia loses her virginity to a corrupt ruler because, in the middle of the story, she mistakes his intentions, thinking that he will honor his commitment to release her brother and to marry her. Since the Shakespearean versions of the stories are well known and follow more or less closely the main incidents of the originals, I shall not go into their structure in detail.

Of more importance are certain details in Whetstone’s adaptation, for they reveal a knowledge of classical structure that goes beyond what the author found in Cinthio’s version. When Whetstone recast the story of Epitia, he chose to divide the action and to present it as two five-act plays. In short, he departed from the pattern of Cinthio’s tale and set out on his own. The design of the two resulting plays shows clearly that Whetstone understood the classical “complex” plot and the importance of a central hamartia.^[46]

In Part I, the first act sets out the problem for the heroine, Cassandra: her brother Andrugio has been con­demned to death for bedding his sweetheart out of wedlock, and Cassandra must now plead with Lord Promos, Andrugio’s harsh judge, to spare the young man. Acts I I-IV contain the “tying up” of complications, which arise because Lord Promos himself succumbs to lust and seeks to seduce Cassandra. She angrily refuses, but after her brother persuades her that her duty is to preserve his life, she agrees to yield—but only if Lord Promos will promise to marry her and to release Andrugio. To these conditions Promos agrees, but he does not intend to carry them out. Just before he takes Cassandra to his bedchamber, he secretly orders that Andrugio be executed and that his body be delivered to his sister in the morning. Thus, the heroine commits a terrible hamartia: at the very moment when she is to yield, her brother is to die. The choice that she thought would save him leads instead to his death—or so, at least, it appears. This hamartia is committed precisely in the middle of Act 111, and from it come tragic scenes of reversal and recognition in Acts IV and V: first, Cassandra receives the body and realizes that she has been betrayed, and then Andrugio’s sweetheart Polina learns that the execution has taken place.

Part II of the play involves a fresh set of complications. Cassandra resolves to bring Promos to justice and seeks out King Corvino, from whom Promos has received his authority as a magistrate. The King believes Cassandra and urges her to confront Promos in a public ceremony arranged to redress grievances. At first, Promos attempts to discredit Cassandra and to shrug off her accusations, but eventually, he is forced to confess and to beg for clemency. The King grants a brief stay of execution so that Promos may redeem some part of Cassandra’s honor by marrying her. But otherwise, Corvino is unbending in his insistence on strict justice: Promos has ordered an execution for a crime that he himself was committing, and therefore, he must die.

These judgments are reached in the middle of Act Ill, and as with the key decisions in Act III of Part I, all are based on a crucial hamartia. The sentencing of Promos depends on the fact that Andrugio has been executed, but in reality, the young man is still alive. A kindly jailor has secretly released him and presented Cassandra with the body of another prisoner. In Act V, Andrugio brings about the climactic scene of reversal and recognition by stepping for­ ward to save the man who would not save him: Lord Promos. Once everyone recognizes that the judgments of Act 111 were based on an error, the King is free to revise them and to grant Promos a pardon, and at the request of a merciful Cassandra, he does. The plot ends happily, with a penitent Promos resolved to be a good husband and a just ruler, and with a similarly chastened Andrugio committed to marry Polin a.

Clearly, Promos and Cassandra follows the outlines of the ancient Greek hamartia-play. Yet the genre from which Whetstone learned the form is difficult to determine. In the plays proper, the main action is described as a “Tragidy”; but on the title page, the works are called “Commicall Discourses,” and in the dedication, they are compared with plays by Menander, Plautus, and Terence. Perhaps without understanding the common origins of the two genres, Whet­ stone succeeded in reuniting them by recasting Cinthio’s neo-Aristotelian tragic plot in the five-act structure of Terentian comedy.

It is, of course, impossible to assess the impact that this combination of comic form and tragic plot may have had upon Shakespeare. If he first read Promos and Cassandra just before he composed Measure for Measure in 1604, then Whetstone’s influence came too late to be formative. But if Shakespeare read the plays early in his career—sometime, say, between their publication in 1578 and the composition of Romeo and Juliet around 1595—then they might have taught him a good deal about the form devised by the ancient Greeks.

V. Conclusion

Although Shakespeare may have known nothing whatever about Aristotle’s Poetics or the plays that it describes, he could hardly have avoided the indirect influence of Greek tragedy. It was all around him, in some of the most popular plays, romances, and stories of the age. Of course, we cannot draw any firm conclusions about the extent to which any one of the works that I have examined may have helped to shape Shakespeare’s practice as a tragedian. Yet he could hardly have been blind to the common pattern of plot construction that underlies them all. They were, after all, not works that he had perused casually but sources that he had studied closely, either in his formative years at grammar school or in the years of his greatest activity as a tragedian. Although he may not have realized it, Greek theory and Greek practice were but one step removed from him in the works of Seneca, Terence, Donatus, Heliodorus, Sidney, Cinthio, and Whetstone.

This fact has, I think, two important consequences for students of Shakespeare. First, we may use Greek concepts and Greek critical terms with no fear of anachronism and no apologies. To be sure, we must use them with caution, for Shakespeare was never a slave to tradition. But we need not fear that we are importing alien distinctions. Second, we may put to rest the old idea that Shakespeare arrived independently at principles of tragic design similar to those of Sophocles and Euripides. Art may be universal, and great minds working on similar problems may reach similar conclusions. Yet in this case, the most important similarities have a straightforward, historical explanation. The pattern of the ancient Greek hamartia-play had reached Shakespeare through such an elaborate network of intermediaries that it seems pointless to cling to the notion of independent discovery.

Once we have reconsidered Shakespeare’s ties with the Greeks, then I think we must also reassess the value of Aristotle’s Poetics as a guide to Shakespearean tragedy. Of course, we may still conclude that, in one respect or another, the treatise is inadequate. But we cannot dismiss it out of hand; it remains the locus classicus for many of the critical distinctions that Shakespeare inherited from anti­quity.

If we make no other use of the Poetics, then at least we may send our students there to discover the long literary tradition that lies behind speeches such as the following one from Act V of Julius Caesar. Standing over the body of Cassius, Messala traces the bloody outcome of the action to a single, familiar origin:

Mistrust of good success hath done this deed.
O hateful Error, Melancholy’s child,
Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men
The things that are not? 0 Error, soon conceived, Thou never com’ st unto a happy birth, .
But kill’st the mother that engend’red thee!