ABSTRACT
In remarking on the creative period of William Shakespeare’s life that produced his great tragedies, Stephen Greenblatt noted the ‘creation of a strategic opacity’ as expressing Shakespeare’s root perception of existence, his understanding of what could be said and what should remain unspoken, his preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled. Greenblatt’s statement would seem implicitly to challenge the view that Shakespeare’s tragedies present his conception of an ordered universe. The significance of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, the impact they have on us, results from the intense imaginative experience they compel us to witness and come to terms with. Shakespeare’s great tragedies, however, make their challenge incontestable by representing so vividly the pain that might occur in life itself. Shakespeare as dramatist makes us uniquely aware of that in which the value and significance of life consist by refusing to offer in his great tragedies any false consolation.
