A Tentative Study Of Shakespeare's Four Tragedies

Shakespeare's dramatic tragedies begin his second period (beginning with "Hamlet", through "Othello", "King Lear", and "Macbeth"). These plays were quite different from those of the poet's early period, not only because he had grown more mature but also because the English society had undergone much fundamental change in the transition from Elizabethan England in the last decades of the 16th century to the new regime of James I in the early years of the 17th century. Shakespeare's great tragedies and his "dark" tragicomedies, written in the very first decade of the 17th century, naturally reflect that age of social and political unrest rather than the poet's own life of "tragic gloom" as suggested by some critics.