ABSTRACT
With Shakespeare's mature plays we come to the most interesting of all possible comparisons with Greek tragic plots. Is the overlap in subject between Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides not only a formal resemblance, but a mark of what makes tragedy essentially 'tragic'? If so, we would expect Shakespeare to have located parallel issues, however differently he treats them; and it is the aim of what follows to make out a case for his gradual uncovering of the same tragic essentials by taking Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Coriolanus in sequence of composition. Jacobean London is not experimenting with democratic reform (though it cannot be irrelevant that within 50 years it saw the ultimate political drama, the execution of Charles I, and the victory of a republican psychology) but nonetheless, as we have seen, there is a strong sense of living at a turning point in the definition of a human being. Shakespeare's tragedies convey that the 'new man', prised out of the cocoon of religious and social pieties, finds himself painfully alone under the stars.
