From theatrical action, from the bustle and verbal agility which are the energy of comedy, the romantics transfer Shakespeare’s characters to a dim realm of spirit where Lamb can detach the souls even of Macbeth, Richard III, and Iago from their criminal designs and emphasise the purely intellectual adventurousness which “prompts them to overleap these moral fences”. Making the tragic heroes spiritual athletes exercising in the air was a prelude to the Victorian interpretation of them (institutionalized by AC Bradley) as exemplary victims of the march of the mind, exterminated because their idea of themselves is too costly and partial for the lucid universe to entertain. The nineteenth century moves serenely towards Bradley’s invention of a genre of Shakespearean tragedy, a ghostly Hegelian paradigm which spiritually unites the heroes and reduces the differences between them to local accidents.
But there is no Shakespearean tragedy. There are only the tragedies, and they are special extensions of comedy. When Yeats called Hamlet and Lear gay, he meant that they possessed a frenzied elation, rejoicing in their own destruction. He should have said that, in one important sense, they are merely laughable. Johnson saw that comedy was Shakespeare’s instinct, tragedy his skill, something to be worked at…..
--PETER CONRAD, ‘Shandyism: The Character of Romantic Irony’
