Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World
by Russ Leo

Reviewed by Raphael Magarik

What explains Hamlet? English drama, for much of the sixteenth century, meant amateur troupes, academic exercises, and religious miracle plays—all about as literarily exciting as open-mic night. And then, all of a sudden, at the end of the century, we get complex, powerful, and haunting tragedies: Shakespeare’s, but also those of his peers, like Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. To attribute this efflorescence to their playwrights’ particular talents is to resort to literary history’s cheap, popular deus ex machina: individual genius. When we call someone a miracle, we mystify, rather than explain, their achievement. 

One popular theory runs like this: the Protestant Reformation, which suppressed the sensual rituals and spectacular artistry of medieval Christianity, created pressurized, subterranean aquifers of creative energy, which Shakespeare and his contemporaries cannily tapped and whose flows they channeled into secular drama. Stephen Greenblatt, for instance, suggests that Hamlet’s haunted, mournful Elsinore reimagines Purgatory, that in-between zone which helped medieval people navigate the passage from mortal life to eternity and which Protestants had officially disavowed. Greenblatt and others admit that the mystery plays, were amateurish and crude. Nonetheless, through them medieval people, especially poorer, ordinary folk, often ignored by literary history, had publically performed the central stories of Christianity. When Protestants ended these productions—which they saw as gaudy, Catholic, and theologically imprecise—they effectively pressurized the energies for the mystery plays had provided a vent. The professional theater that emerged under Queen Elizabeth, the story goes, offered a release valve for this pressure. In this reading, the return of these rituals’ repressed intensity powers Shakespeare’s high, literary art. 

This theory became popular in the ’80s and ’90s, partly because it read Shakespeare as popular culture: his plays, it was suggested, brilliantly appealed to a folk yearning for the theatrical, the magical, the hocus-pocus of Catholicism, outlawed by an austerely rationalist, Protestant elite. But if the theory innovated by focusing on ordinary, lower-class people, it also provided a convenient narrative for thinking about religion and art in Renaissance England. Take the striking fact, for instance, that the Blackfriars playhouse, of which Shakespeare was a lease-holder and where several of his plays were performed, was (as its name suggests) a converted Dominican priory. As it did abstractly in Greenblatt’s narrative, theater at Blackfriars quite concretely substituted for Catholic ritual: costumes for priestly vestments, tickets for alms-collection, fictions for sacred dogmas. We all know the story of how the non-religious theater absorbed the potent, magical forces of a dying religion and transformed them into entertainment: that is what we call secularization.

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In his new book, Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World, Russ Leo calls this basic story—that great English drama is Catholic ritual secularized—into question. To be sure, as Leo writes, his book tells only “part of the larger history of tragedy in early modernity”—the part that is both highly academic and insistently Protestant—which is itself just one province in the yet larger kingdom of Renaissance drama. Nonetheless, Leo’s work contributes to a growing body of work which, rather than stressing Renaissance drama’s popular, ritual origins in medieval Christianity, instead focuses on elite, academic Protestant writers. Recent work by Lorna Hutson, Micha Lazarus, and others have emphasized the learned, bookish culture of the Renaissance itself, turning in the search for English Renaissance tragedy’s origins not to folk plays but instead to dense, erudite Latin texts. 

Leo argues that English Renaissance tragedy was heady, cognitively demanding, and intellectual—less akin to a magic show or awe-inspiring Mass than to a logic puzzle or philosophical debate. And while in the familiar story, secular drama substitutes for public religion, Leo suggests other relationships between drama and religion. Theological writing, for instance, might take the form of literary theory. The Reformation spurred theological debates about biblical interpretation, the role of spectacular ritual in religion, and the relation between human action and divine providence. In each case, Leo argues, Protestant writers drew the terms in which they discussed these question from Aristotelian tragic theory. Whereas in the old story, secular drama substituted for religion after the suppression of the mystery plays, for Leo, tragedy and religion are in creative dialogue.

Leo focuses on a series of Latin plays, treatises on tragedy and commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics, and the influence these relatively obscure materials had on several major English poems: Hamlet and John Milton’s great 1671 poems, that is, the brief epic Paradise Regained and the closet drama Samson Agonistes. 

Aristotle’s Poetics, which was rediscovered in the Renaissance, stands at the center of the project. It is perhaps the greatest classical work of literary theory, but more importantly, for Leo, Aristotle unites tragedy with philosophy, which is to say, he treats tragedy as a tool for investigating “questions of causality, freedom and necessity that traversed boundaries between art and life.” In contrast with, say, Socrates’ attacks on poetry as immoral lying, Aristotle suggested that tragedies do not tell us what did happen – a misperception which opened the door for Socrates’s accusations, but rather what would or should happen. Whether Oedipus in fact killed his father and slept with his mother matters no more than whether there actually are any brains in vats, innocent victims tied to trolley tracks, self-torturing devices, or any of the other props and stage-sets of contemporary analytic philosophy. A tragedy, like a philosopher’s thought experiment, is true not to history, but to logic, reason, and nature. For Renaissance critics, the tragedian, in drawing the hidden lines of causality and nature that stand behind the bizarre, confusing, and contradictory events we observe, told truths more profound than the historian’s. A good proof of the Pythagorean theorem, after all, reveals more about triangles than any number of fumbling, imperfect measurements.

Leo also shows how useful these ideas were to early modern Protestant theologians. A series of Protestant biblical commentators, theologians, and neo-Latin playwrights, for instance, imagined the book of Revelation as itself a tragedy. While sixteenth century Catholic readers typically encountered Revelation as a history of the early Church, Protestants instead thought it included past history and future prediction within a general, abstract, structure. That structure, Leo strikingly shows, was taken from tragic theory. In his 1618 commentary on Revelation, David Pareus, a German Protestant, supplies a list of dramatis personae, identifies the book’s prologue and tragic choruses, and emphasizes the “tragic form of the [book’s] vision.” Revelation’s cycles of violence and repair, Pareus suggests, correspond to the turbulent movements of Church history, yet, forebodingly, only the tragic catastrophe is absent. Pareus presses the reader of Revelation to a tragic recognition of the story’s ending: tragedy thus becomes another way of thinking about prophecy.

If the Protestant Aristotelianism Leo discusses inspired renewed attention to tragic form, it also involved considerable skepticism about tragic spectacle: the special effects, ornate displays, and loud sounds of theater which elicit wonder from an audience. For Aristotelians, such spectacle is at best irrelevant, at worst misleading distractions. (After all, as most academics know, in principle, one can reason about a play’s plot without having seen it performed, perhaps without even having read it.) John Rainolds, for example, is known to literary scholars as the sourpuss moralist who, in his 1599 Th' Overthrow of Stage Plays, poured his vitriol on the Elizabethan theater. Shakespearians have sometimes treated Rainolds as a Bible-thumping, simplistic critic of secular culture, in part because they implicitly separate between church and stage. But as Leo shows, Rainolds hated theater because he loved tragedy: he carefully read Aristotle and classical drama. He wanted to pare down both the church and the genre of tragedy, stripping them of their idolatrous, spectacular, and dangerous enticements. (Not all critics were as dogmatic. In an influential 1570 treatise on Aristotle’s Poetics, for instance, the Italian scholar Ludovico Castelvetro allowed, though with evident distaste, that if God accommodated the irrational masses with razzle-dazzle miracles and showy rituals, so too could the playwright.)

Connecting the real-life Rainolds to the character Reynaldo in Hamlet, Leo argues that through Reynaldo, Shakespeare satirizes anti-theatrical churchman. But Shakespeare does so for his own quasi-Aristotelian purposes. Hamlet defends theatrical showmanship because it alone makes a play’s plot realistic for viewers. Staging a play enables Hamlet to ascertain Claudius’s guilt, showing that, as Leo writes, Aristotle-like “forensic reconstruction of motive and causality… requires a more lively and spectacular form of enactment” than Rainolds would allow. By placing Rainolds and Shakespeare in conversation, Leo shows how Hamlet’s meta-theater emerges in dialogue with the scholarly, philosophical literary criticism on which Leo’s book focuses.

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Leo is a scholar’s scholar, in that he writes both for and about scholars. Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World is admirably clear, but it clearly imagines his readers to be something like Milton’s preferred “fit audience… though few.” There are no strong, expansive claims for present-day relevance, but there is plenty of quoted Latin, Italian and Greek. Further, Leo reads tragedies almost as if they were treatises of literary theory: not what we can learn from Hamlet or Samson Agonistes about, say, revenge or suicide or whatnot, but what they tell us about tragedy. 

In particular, Leo’s book significantly reinterprets Renaissance classicist criticism, academic evaluations of which are often pejorative and dismissive. Part of the logic of turning to the mystery plays and popular Catholicism to explain Elizabethan theater, after all, was the thought that Renaissance classicist criticism’s long, dense critical treatises and academic neo-Latin plays were dry and infertile, a desert from which no good literature could have grown. Renaissance classicism was imagined as fussy, prim, and overly rigid. The supposed “classical unities”—the idea that a tragedy takes place over one day, in one place, and so on—have little basis in classical drama, we are often reminded: they were invented by Renaissance commentators. True enough, and yet the implication behind the point, too often, is that neoclassicism means bad classicism. Instead, Leo suggests that the Renaissance revival of Aristotle was philosophically rich and sophisticated. That is, rather for looking in classicism’s influence in the rigid obedience to rules—the classical unities, significant action taking place off-stage, and so on—Leo finds it in a way of thinking about how plots work and what they are for. The greatness of Shakespearian drama, the argument runs, lies not in its appeal to forbidden popular pleasures, but in its rigorous investigation of thorny philosophical problems—an investigation playwrights learned from Renaissance critics. 

Recuperating Renaissance classicism involves rescuing it from the accusation that, in making tragedy compatible with Christian theology and mores, its critics and theorists      inadvertently drained it of its vitality. To modern readers, the critics of the sixteenth and seventeenth century have above all moralized Aristotle. Aristotle had said the purpose of tragedy was to evoke fear and pity in the audience, but the Poetics is not so clear on the “why.” Renaissance interpreters newly suggested that this “catharsis” might purge the audience of harmful emotions, helping you reach, as Samson Agonistes finally does, a salutary “calm of mind, all passion spent.” The moralism could even go further, as when Renaissance writers imagined tragedies as didactic sermons on the dangers of vice. In so doing, modern readers often found, they were pruning the classical heritage into the restrained, socially acceptable shapes of Christian Renaissance culture—as if one were to pollard a magnificent redwood, forcing its wild grandeur into the decorative shapes of a domestic garden. 

Leo is arguing instead that these Renaissance readers of Aristotle produced a novel but philosophically powerful theory of tragedy. Far from just being academic bowdlerizers and sermonizers, they saw tragedy as a profound tool with which to think about the world. Leo thus offers us an exciting view of Renaissance classicism’s intellectual strength: the seriousness with which these readers took the Poetics, the ways Protestants used Aristotle as they imagined remaking the Church, and, above all, these theorists and critics’ new, philosophical conception of tragedy. Tragedy attempts both to render the world realistically and to abstract beyond its contingent particulars.