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REVIEW Wilson, Harold S. On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy. U of Toronto P, 1957. Thesis: Wilson's general topic is the relationship between Christian ideals and Shakespeare's achievement in tragedy. He asserts that "Antony and Cleopatra and King Lear represent Shakespeare's greatest achievements in tragedy" (13), because they leave us with "the sense that human life has been ennobled in and through the tragic experience" (13). Those two plays, Wilson writes, "achieve a harmony or synthesis, a transformation and refinement, of natural human ethics through the triumphant emergence of a supremely Christian value, the value of the new law of human love which takes precedence of the old law of justice" (216-217). On the other hand, "The effect [of Macbeth] is like an indictment of human nature; we share in Macbeth's guilt and we recognize his damnation as just, rather than triumphing in the reassertion of a moral order which is divinely imposed" (80). However, Wilson does value Macbeth very highly, particularly because of its portrait of Macbeth's character: Throughout Macbeth, we watch the deterioration of a great man; but we never lose the sense of his greatness. As he becomes more desperate, Macbeth acquires something of the savagery of Euripides' Medea, though we cannot feel that he has been wronged. Yet if Macbeth is soleley responsible, he himself pays the cost. Our repugnance for his savagery is qualified by the spectacle of his suffering; he himself suffers more than anybody else. In this universal pattern, we may recognize the common burden we share with Macbeth, those of us who pay some part of the price for our sins in this world. . . . Macbeth is constantly tormented by scruples--humane scruples rather than religious; there is too much of the milk of human kindness in him to make him throughly successful. He is gradually transformed into a monster, after the murder of Duncan; and yet we can still catch glimpses of the different man might have been--a man greatly loved, a courteous man, born to command: Now good digestion wait on appetite, And health on both, he says to his guests, a most genial and characteristically profane grace. He is capable of gentleness and generosity: there is a tender human love between him and his wife, though they are both abandoned to evil . . . . Above all, he is a poetic person, a man of great and imaginative sensitiveness, one of those rare persons we sometimes meet, if we are lucky, whose every word thrills us, who are incapable of dullness or the commoner kinds of stupidity, even though they may be guilty of greater crimes. All this, along with his wickedness, is part of the man we somehow value and feel for.  (77) Evaluation: Because he has a large project in hand, Wilson tends to glide over things that I'd like read about. For example, just what are some examples of Macbeth's "humane scruples"? Bottom Line: Often eloquent.

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