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In The Tragic Engagement, Judah Stampfer undertakes a full, unifying study of Shakespeare's classical tragedies. Beginning with Titus Andronicus (1591-1592), he moves chronologically through Julius Caesar (1599), Troilus and Cressida (1602), Timon of Athens (1607), Antony and Cleopatra (1607) to the 'drier, more arid' world of Coriolanus (1608-1609). With emphasis on plot and characterization, and with liberal use of pertinent quotations, Stampfer, an Associate Professor of English at State University, Stony Brook, New York, presents each play separately with skilful analysis, understanding, and erudition, tracing the development of Shakespeare's art. The analysis of each play stands well by itself, and merits careful reading by all interested in the classical tragedies. The weakness of the author's approach, however, lies in his attempt to provide unifying factors to tie all six plays together.
To Stampfer the classical tragedies reveal three heroic types involved in the 'tragic engagement'—the ethical hero, with high principles and 'Christian' ethics, exemplified by Brutus; the politic hero, with cold strategy and reason, exemplified by Octavius; the willful hero, with impulsive emotions and personal interests, exemplified by Antony. As far as the willful hero is concerned, the author reaches the height of his analysis in his finely detailed scrutiny of Coriolanus deeply involved with his mother, Volumnia, whose all-reaching maternity engulfs him in destruction. Coriolanus's struggle, according to Stampfer, is the struggle of the boy to free himself from the mother.
Also of interest to psychoanalysts is Stampfer's conjectured correlation of Shakespeare's emergence into 'bitter' tragic creation with the death of his father in 1601, and the cessation of such creativity with the death of his mother in 1608. The writing of the last four classical tragedies fell, then, between his two great parental losses. Tenuous as such conjecture always is (and particularly s