In my last post, I outlined two patterns in history: grace to wrath and wrath to grace. In literature, we call the former tragedy and the latter comedy.
These terms appear in the Shakespearean tragedies I’ve been writing about for the last few months.
In Julius Caesar we have these two key quotes that show the gap between “grace” and “wrath.” Brutus tells his comrades to kill Caesar “boldly, but not wrathfully.” In the assassination’s aftermath, Cassius tells the conspirators to “grace” Brutus’s heals “with the most boldest and best hearts of Rome.” Antony exposes the murder as wrath, and Brutus finds no grace from Caesar’s ghost.
In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo tells the friar “she whom I love now / Doth grace for grace and love for love allow.” The play ends in wrath, however. As the Prince says, “[A]ll are punish’d.”
Hamlet juxtaposes the grace of heaven (“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”) with the wrath of revenge (“roasted in wrath and fire”).
As for Macbeth, the title character admits that when he kills Duncan, “renown and grace is dead.” The witches themselves judge Macbeth as “spiteful and wrathful.” He has rejected grace, and he reaps wrath.
King Lear begins with wrath as Lear banishes his daughter and and the devoted Kent: “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” Gloucester too comes to see his son Edgar as “the food of thy abused father’s wrath!” Lear calls to the heavens for “grace” because “I am a man More sinn’d against than sinning.” Lear and Cordelia find no grace in the final scene. All that remains is “the gored state.”
Each play provides melody for this theme in a different covenantal key. The characters of Julius Caesar see wrath and grace as the province of a transcendent state. Romeo and Juliet expect to find grace in an idolatrous marriage and receive wrath. Hamlet should announce, rather than enact, wrath, and only when he finds divine grace in the fall of a sparrow does he carry out his prophetic task. Macbeth reaps the sanction of divine wrath for his sins. King Lear demonstrates how wrath can be applied generationally and damage hopes of succession.
Experiments in Criticism 