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Shakespeare's Tragedies: What Makes Them Great
Hardcover
Series: Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities
Literary CriticismTheater History
Publisher Price: $35.00
ISBN13: 9781503647572
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: Oct 20 2026
Pages: 392
Language: English
A lively and provocative introduction to Shakespeare's five major tragedies, revealing their profoundly sympathetic and illuminating exploration of human experience.
Shakespeare's Tragedies illuminates the majestic beauties and subtle insights of the great playwright's greatest works. Building from a helpful introduction of each tragedy, and progressing to advanced new interpretations, Watson reveals what these famous plays offer us as we confront the heartbreaking aspects of life and the redeeming virtues of our flawed humanity.
Watson shows Romeo and Juliet providing dreamy romance, but also exploring the fears of sexual violence that Juliet must heroically overcome, in a play that marries comedy to tragedy, as love and death intertwine. Analyzing Hamlet's centuries-long worldwide fame, Watson shows how it speaks to our Information (and Disinformation) Age, and why the conventional 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 psychological roots of villainy, and shows how the play articulates the tragic costs of believing that love (from a person or a deity) must be bought or deserved, rather than embraced as a miracle. King Lear amplifies those warnings, explodes many complacent certainties, and imposes an ending so multiply shocking that it was hidden for 150 years.
Watson 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. The book concludes with a rousing advocacy for Shakespeare as an enduring force--across races, nations, genders, and generations--for understanding and justice.
The culmination of Robert N. Watson's distinguished career as a scholar and teacher, Shakespeare's Tragedies explains, in fresh, accessible, and moving ways, why multitudes have treasured this playwright's tragic masterpieces for centuries.
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