Shakespeaerian Tragedies The Link to Aristotles Ideas Essay

Shakespeaerian Tragedies: The Link to Aristotles Ideas The central concern of tragedy has always been to explore the nature of evil in the world; both its existence and the nature of particular types of evil and their effect. If we are to find the meaning of Shakespeares tragedies, we must examine how men looked at the problem of evil in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Much of the philosophy which under-pinned the English Renaissance can be traced to the ideas of Aristotle. It can be argued that the central concern of King Lear is the†¦show more content†¦Anyone who shows, in speech or action, a tendency to slight rather than praise these qualities upon which we base our self-esteem, will be the recipient of our anger. However, we will be more angry with friends than with others, with those who have previously treated us deferentially and now change, and with those who do not adequately appreciate or return kindness. He also suggests that the feeble are more given to anger than the strong, and old men rather than the young. Other thinkers, contemporary with Shakespeare, such as Newton, emphasised also the pride that precedes anger and the shame that succeeds it. Newton also explained that while anger harms those against whom it is directed, it harms even more the person in whose heart the passion rises. He suggests that the mind must be reined by reason and curbed by temperance. There was, then, in Shakespeares day an old and firmly founded philosophy of anger, based upon ancient philosophy and medieval reworkings of those ideas. According to this philosophy, pride or self-esteem is the condition in which anger takes its rise, vengeance becomes its immediate object, and some slight, real or imagined, is its cause. Anger is folly; shame its consequence. The sequence of passions is pride, anger, revenge, and, unless madness clouds the reason altogether, shame. Anger hurts him who feels it even more than it