Do Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes Have Tragic Flaws?
Wherein the misbegotten notion of the tragic flaw floats like a dandelion seed head to the fertile soil of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
In an earlier post “Au Revoir, Tragic Flaw,” I wrote about a particularly tenacious cliché born of a mistranslation of an ancient Greek word. In his Poetics, Aristotle uses the word hamartia to identify the cause of the Greek tragic hero’s destruction. But hamartia means ‘mistake,’ not ‘tragic flaw.’ (Just so we’re sure here, it does not mean anything like ‘fate.’) I’ve copied the whole thing at the bottom of this post if you missed it. The message in short is:[name your Greek tragic hero] did not end up brought low because of a tragic flaw in his character.
The notion of the tragic flaw as a way to understand why bad things happen to important characters floated like a dandelion seed head over to Shakespeare’s tragedies. Because more people read Shakespeare than Greek tragedy, it found even more fertile ground.
But I can only root out so many weeds at once, and Shakespeare’s work is not my turf. (Okay, I’m done with the front lawn metaphors.)
So I was delighted to come across an essay by the brilliant Fintan O’Toole whose new book is Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life. Here’s a bit of what he says.
“The most obvious problem with all that is, even if it were true, it would be crushingly dull. Moral tales in which people do bad things because they have wicked instincts and then get their comeuppance are ten a penny….If the definition of tragedy lies in the tragic flaw of the protagonist, we are reduced to a monotonous game of matching the shortcoming to the character: Hamlet = angst; Macbeth = ambition; Othello = jealousy; Lear = reckless vanity.”
O’Toole is not just a wonderful stylist; he prods you to think. I am shamefully ignorant when it comes to Shakespeare, but I think it’s safe to say that O’Toole is not. I’m not sure if he knows the history of ‘tragic flaw,' but if ever we meet, I’ll ask him. And if it turns out that he doesn’t know, what fun I will have explaining it to him. I love explaining.
Here’s the link to O’Toole’s article in the New York Review of Books.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/06/06/no-comfort-shakespeare-fintan-otoole/
And here’s my original post. I’d still love for you to head over to my home page and see my other posts. I promise you that Greek tragedy is not boring, irrelevant, or too hard to understand, even if it was all those things when you were dragged through Antigone in high school or your Western Civ survey course in college.
Au Revoir, Tragic Flaw
Oedipus the King ends with a great man brought low. Whose fault is it? His? His father’s? A mortal’s fate, that not even the gods control (or so it seems)? Why did it have to happen?
So much to think about in this post! It turns out I'd been thinking of hamartia as an ingrained tragic flaw for many years (a conviction no doubt ingrained by a well-meaning English teacher). To think of it as simply an error changes everything, and suggests that any of us—whether a king or an ordinary mortal—can make a mistake leading to a cascade of tragic consequences.
I read this post out loud to my husband as we were driving, and we proceeded to have a long discussion about fate and free will and prophecies, not just in Sophocles' plays but also in the Oresteia. I'm so glad to have this new perspective—and I'm adding Fintan O'Toole to my reading list.
This is a fab post worth repeating. I am an inveterate reader of Fintan O'Toole and this is another of his best.