ABSTRACT
Tragedy as an art form has been regarded as sublimating material that would be too painful or shocking if experienced in real life. When John Milton came to write his Christian ‘tragedy’ Samson Agonistes, the relevant passage from the Poetics was in his mind. During the eighteenth century there was in tragedy a demand for ‘poetical justice’, which was regarded as a paradigm of divine justice. Among those who regarded this as a future reality, such emotional assurance was looked for. Accordingly the stark ending of William Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy posed something of a problem. Scholarship variously undertaken by Stephen Greenblatt and James Shapiro has considered William Shakespeare’s work in relation to its contemporary social and political context. As one of the King’s Men this was for Shakespeare a remarkably creative period of his life, with King Lear and Macbeth both acted in 1606.
