Shakespearean Tragedy and the Nostalgic Vision
Irby B. Cauthen
In Macbeth, declares Maynard Mack, Jr. , in his perceptive study Killing the King, Shakespeare presents a vision of "an older, idealized order of kingship embodied by Duncan that is attacked and destroyed by the villian-hero." Shakespeare had used such a vision in Richard II through John of Gaunt's lyric hymn that recalls the past days of England's greatness; now—"I die pronouncing it," he says— "That England that was wont to conquer others/Hath made a shameful conquest of itself." And the theme is at the basis of Hamlet: a great king continues to be mourned by his son who properly sees him as Hyperion to a satyr. In Richard II, Hamlet, and Macbeth, Mr. Mack notes, "the "nostalgic" world is deprived of whatever actual existence it may have had, but the dream of order on which it is based refuses to die .... We may in some ways welcome the shift from the old epic world with its hierarchies and inflexibilities to a new, dramatic world of mask and manipulation. But the shift is painful, wasteful, and irreversible for those involved." Indeed, one may add, it is part of the dramatic progression and the sense of tragic loss.
