Note 156 — LECTURE VII

Caution is very necessary in making comparisons between Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists. A tragedy like the Antigone stands, in spite of differences, on the same ground as a Shakespearean tragedy; it is a self-contained whole with a catastrophe. A drama like the Philoctetes is a self-contained whole, but, ending with a solution, it corresponds not with a Shakespearean tragedy but with a play like Cymbeline. A drama like the Agamemnon or the Prometheus Vinctus answers to no Shakespearean form of play. It is not a self-contained whole, but a part of a trilogy. If the trilogy is considered as a unit, it answers not to Hamlet but to Cymbeline. If the part is considered as a whole, it answers to Hamlet, but may then be open to serious criticism. Shakespeare never made a tragedy end with the complete triumph of the worse side: the Agamemnon and Prometheus, if wrongly taken as wholes, would do this, and would so far, I must think, be bad tragedies. [It can scarcely be necessary to remind the reader that, in point of 'self-containedness,' there is a difference of degree between the pure tragedies of Shakespeare and some of the historical.]