The Promised End: Endings in Shakespeare's tragedies

By Peter Mercer

The Promised End explores how the endings of Shakespeare’s tragedies work – how, in effect, they resist conventional closure. It looks back from the endings of five plays – Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear – to explore how their structures of action, imagery and the interaction of different genres – comedy, tragedy and romance – bring them to conclusions that are both inevitable and yet strangely incongruous, beyond explanation and moral understanding, almost too terrible to bear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781528957113

Peter Mercer

Peter Mercer was a lecturer in English Literature at the University of East Anglia for some thirty years. He later worked as an editor in magazine publishing. He is the author of Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge (Macmillan and University of Iowa Press).

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About the Author

Peter Mercer was a lecturer in English Literature at the University of East Anglia for some thirty years. He later worked as an editor in magazine publishing. He is the author of Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge (Macmillan and University of Iowa Press).

Dedication

To Amelia

Copyright Information ©

Peter Mercer 2023

The right of Peter Mercer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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Introduction

At the end of the third Act of Thomas Kyd’s ‘The Spanish Tragedy’, the Ghost of Andrea is dismayed to find that Revenge, a Fury figure with whom he has served ‘for Chorus in this tragedy’ from its beginning, has fallen asleep. He fears that his foes will now never meet their promised end in pain and misery but Revenge assures him that he has slept only because the end can never be in doubt, because he knows ‘what ’tis to be subject to destiny’.

Shakespeare’s tragedies, like most tragedies, end in catastrophes which seem just as inevitable. Their heroes are brought to destruction as a consequence of actions—mistakes, misjudgements, follies—that can never be reversed. But to see their ends as unavoidable is not to understand what they mean. The survivors that gather on the stage at the end of these plays always try to impose a meaning on the disaster they have witnessed—try to make sense of it all—but their attempts are usually far from persuasive.

Often, they seek a moral significance in the catastrophe, as if its terror can be made more bearable if it can be understood as the consequence of some transgression peculiar to the hero. Sometimes the need for moral certainty can even seem to displace the tragedy that is at the heart of the play, as when Malcolm and Macduff, at the end of ‘Macbeth’, celebrate their victory over ‘this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen’ as a completely unambiguous triumph of good over evil. And even when the pity of the tragedy is apparent to everyone left on the stage, as in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, its meaning may be evaded by reframing it as a moral lesson. So, the Prince makes clear that these ‘piteous woes’ are the consequence of the discord of his rebellious subjects, those ‘enemies to peace’, and that ‘now all are punished’. No-one is keen to know why this tale of love was so ‘death-marked’ from the very beginning.

The Venetian nobles who observe the ruin of Othello are rather less confident in their judgment. Lodovico may ask what shall be said to one who ‘was once so good’ but Othello’s answer that he is ‘an honourable murderer, if you will’ does little to ease his uncertainty. It is much less disturbing to pursue the question of how Iago, this ‘demi-devil’, has ‘ensnared’ the Moor’s soul, as if this was a story of diabolical temptation, than to confront the totality of Othello’s loss.

Horatio and Fortinbras are far less evasive in their responses to Hamlet’s tragedy. To the first, he is the ‘sweet prince’, whom flights of angels will sing to his rest, and to the second, a soldier’s soldier who, had he become a king, ‘would have prov’d most royal’. The account that Horatio offers to give of how ‘these things came about’ will present him simply as the victim of his enemies, will absolve him of almost all responsibility for the carnage that the stage now presents. If Lodovico turned away from Othello’s tragedy, Horatio is unwilling to see Hamlet’s fate as a tragedy at all, except in as much as it brings him to his death.

Sometimes, however, there is almost nothing to be said at the end. The savage reversal of the expectations that have been set up in the movement of the action of ‘King Lear’ to Dover and to apparent deliverance leaves the remaining characters quite unable to find any meaning in the terrible spectacle before them. Amid the ‘general woe’, Edgar can offer only the most bathetic conclusion.

‘Here sit we down to see the mystery,’ says Revenge to the Ghost at the beginning of ‘The Spanish Tragedy’. The mystery of the fates of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes is, perhaps, exactly what is evaded by the choric voices that attempt to bring closure to their stories. And that mystery may inhere in our sense that while their fates are indeed in some way inevitable, the consequences of actions and choices, they are also somehow incongruous, strangely unfair, more terrible than they surely deserve. That is why their tragedies move us to pity as well as to fear.

These essays attempt to explore these incongruities by looking back from the endings of five of Shakespeare’s tragedies to the structures of action and imagery that bring them to their ‘promised end’.

1

Romeo and Juliet—Descrying

the True Ground

When, at the end of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, the Watch comes across the pitiful sight of Juliet and Paris lying dead (no one mentions Romeo yet), they don’t quite know what to make of it. Their leader can see that there has been some kind of violent struggle, because the ground is bloody. But what can he make of the fact that Juliet lies ‘bleeding, warm and newly dead’ when she has, as he knows, lain in the tomb for the last two days? He admits that they see and yet they don’t see.

We see the ground whereon these woes do lie

But the true ground of all these piteous woes

We cannot without circumstance descry.

We too, in the audience, both see and don’t see. We are much better informed than the Watch—we have seen the piteous woes unfold over the last five acts and we respond now to the pity of it all. Yet we probably don’t really know what it all means. We are unsure of the significance of what we have watched, the why of it, the ‘true ground’. And that uncertainty is disturbing.

But, for now, the First Watch is looking for clues—of who has done what to whom. And a large part of the business of this scene is bringing these facts to light, explaining to the play’s remaining characters what has happened.

The First Watch has already sent for the Prince as well as for the Capulets and the Montagues. For the Prince, the play’s ruling order figure, called by this disturbance from his morning rest, it must look like his ‘rebellious subjects, enemies to peace’, as he called them in the play’s first scene, have brought predictable disaster on themselves. But for now the loud ‘outrage’ of the opposing families must give way to impartial investigation—‘Till we can clear these ambiguities, / And know their spring, their head, their true descent’:

The first witness is the Friar. His account accords with all the most obvious things that the audience is likely to feel about the play—that it has all been a series of misunderstandings, of unhappy accidents, of well-meant stratagems gone horribly wrong. It has not really been anyone’s fault, not even that of the feuding families. Tybalt’s death, for example, was just ‘untimely’, not least because, as he explains, it led Capulet to hurry on Juliet’s marriage to Paris to console her, without knowing that it was Romeo, whom she had just secretly married, for whom she ‘pin’d’.

In other words, what the Friar describes is not a so much a tragedy of ineluctable fate as a comedy gone disastrously wrong. The Friar’s plan to help the lovers was ruined by bad timing, Friar John was accidently delayed so Romeo didn’t get the letter; he himself arrived at Juliet’s tomb a few minutes before she revived, only to find Romeo and Paris ‘untimely’ dead. The Friar offers no adverse judgement on these two young men—the one is noble, the other true. He points not to a meaning but only to a spectacle of woe.

So the fault, it seems, is not in ourselves but in our stars. The lovers are just victims of inconstant or blind Fortune. The Friar’s account accords with the simplest of all readings of tragic action, especially those familiar to an Elizabethan audience. Tragic stories show us how all of us, but above all the best of us, the bravest, the fairest—all those who shine the brightest—are in the end but Fortune’s fools.

And there’s no doubt that ‘Romeo and Juliet’ does indeed offer us plenty of signs that point to such an understanding. At the very beginning the Prologue promised us a tale of ‘star-cross’d lovers’. Before Capulet’s feast, where Romeo looked only to see the fair Rosaline, he fears ‘Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars’. And at his end, in Juliet’s tomb, he seeks to ‘shake the yoke of inauspicious stars / From this world-wearied flesh’.

We are all also sailors on an uncertain sea. When Romeo’s ominous dream is brushed aside by Mercutio’s fantastical tale of Queen Mab, he puts his fate in the helmsman that steers all our ships—‘But he that hath the steerage of my course / Direct my sail!’ By the play’s end, of course, the metaphor has darkened; now only death’s hand is on the tiller—‘Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on / The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark’

On the other hand, Lawrence is a holy man, so ascribing it all to bad timing and Fortune may not quite seem to cover it. He may be anxious to insist that no-one is really to blame, least of all himself, but it’s not surprising that he also makes some effort to ascribe the disaster to God’s inscrutable purposes. When Juliet woke to find Romeo dead, he told her that ‘A greater power than we can contradict / Hath thwarted our intents’ and offered to ‘dispose’ of her ‘among a sisterhood of holy nuns’. And now he tells the Prince that he had entreated her to ‘bear this work of heaven with patience’. So now it’s not just mischance but heaven that has undone all their plans. As usual, God works in mysterious ways.

But this pious moralising is entirely in accord with the meaning that the Prince in swift to impose on the affair. He accepts the explanations of Lawrence, and of Romeo’s servant and Paris’s page, but turns his judgement directly on to his troublesome subjects.

Capulet, Montague,

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate

That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.

It is entirely typical of the play’s pervasive fondness for paradox and word-play that he can characterise heaven’s workings in such cryptic terms. The suggestion seems to be that God has found a particularly apt means of punishing their mutual hatred by bringing death to their children—their ‘joys’—through the very love those children had for each other. Of course, he has already greeted Montague with the observation that he is now ‘early up…to see thy son and heir more early down’. Nothing is so grave, it seems, in this play, but that it may be an occasion for elegant wit.

But for all his talk of heaven’s purposes, the meaning that the Prince imposes on the action is essentially secular. It is the feuding of the Capulets and Montagues—those ‘rebellious subjects, enemies to peace’—that has brought about these woes. This is just what the Chorus promised us at the very beginning—a tale of ancient grudges breaking out in civic blood. And it’s the simplest version of the play’s meaning, the one everyone knows.

And, of course, Montague and Capulet accept the judgment. They join hands and vow to raise golden statues of their fallen children. Again, we were told at