Shakespearean Tragedies: Delving into the Sublime

Abstract

Many who have experienced the good old days lament what to them is the seeming readiness of literature to sing its swan song. Literature indeed is a bitter pill to swallow specifically Shakespeare. Why even the college majors of English and Literature are almost ignorant of this playwright who has touched every age (Garber, 2005). Literature has fed the imaginations and souls of many for thousands of years with stories of people handed down through ages. Today, in the curriculum, it is only used as springboard to teach grammar and other topics. It is deemed irrelevant nowadays since it is the indirect opposition of science and technology. Today’s generation are highly anchored to solid facts taught in school and presented in media, that it is futile to teach literature (Drucker, 2017).

This study then explored the sources of the sublime in three Shakespearean tragedies (Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and King Lear), the factors contributing to the waning appreciation of literature, and the potential avenues for its revival using the qualitative descriptive method.

Findings revealed that the Shakesperean plays contained sources of the sublime, as enumerated by Longinus: grandeur of thoughts, vehement passion, embellished language, noble diction, and elevated composition. The tragic sublime as posited by Burke and Kant was exemplified by Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. These results recommend that classical dramas, specifically Shakespeare’s, be taught in the senior high school and college levels across all disciplines. Cooperative learning, communicative language teaching, visualization technique, and flipped classroom model were recommended as helpful learning strategies to teach classical literature specifically the Shakesperean plays.