Tragedy and Consciousness

Macbeth and Hamlet find themselves in a position which leaves them nothing but their own reflections on the nature of life. Life becomes impossible for them but consciousness remains, and tragedy is expressed in its clarity and its poetry. Othello is also a tragedy of consciousness, but in a different sense. The consciousness that fills Hamlet is a tragic consciousness, a sense of tragedy needing no more than the freedom into which the plot has released it. As the play, by invoking tragedy, turns away from it into multifarious life, speculation, consciousness, so Hamlet himself both follows the process and determines it. Macbeth involuntarily gives the audience that inwardness with his wife in which the seeds of the tragedy were incubated. Macbeth is both the consciousness of the onlooker, by definition a non-tragic person, and the protagonist of an action who finds he has done something no onlooker could ever do.