Uploaded April 2025 | Updated September 2026, 6 hours ago
In Conversation with Emily Wilson
In Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis offers a powerfully original reassessment of tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it—of what drew him toward tragic drama, what makes his tragedies distinctive, and why they matter.
After reconstructing tragic theory and practice as Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew them, Lewis considers in detail each of Shakespeare’s tragedies from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus. He argues that these plays are a series of experiments whose greatness lies in their author’s nerve-straining determination to represent the experience of living in a world that eludes rational analysis. They explore not just our inability to know ourselves as we would like to, but the compensatory and generally unacknowledged fictions to which we bind ourselves in our hunger for meaning—from the political, philosophical, social, and religious to the racial, sexual, personal, and familial. Lewis’s Shakespeare not only creates tragedies that exceed those written before them. Through his art, he also affirms and invigorates the kinds of knowing that are available to intelligent animals like us.
A major reevaluation of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art is essential reading for anyone interested in Shakespeare, tragedy, or the capacity of literature to help us navigate the perplexities of the human condition.
After many years at the University of Oxford, Rhodri Lewis moved to Princeton in 2018—where he teaches English and comparative literature. His new book, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, was a New Yorker Book of the Year for 2024, and for the duration of the 2025-26 academic year he will be a Guggenheim Fellow. Previous books include Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton UP 2017) and Language, Mind, and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge UP 2007). He is now at work on two projects: a biography of the great literary critic Frank Kermode, and a new edition (and translation) of Francis Bacon’s Wisdom of the Ancients.
The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.
Recorded April 23, 2025
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The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.
In Conversation with Emily Wilson
In Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis offers a powerfully original reassessment of tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it—of what drew him toward tragic drama, what makes his tragedies distinctive, and why they matter.
After reconstructing tragic theory and practice as Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew them, Lewis considers in detail each of Shakespeare’s tragedies from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus. He argues that these plays are a series of experiments whose greatness lies in their author’s nerve-straining determination to represent the experience of living in a world that eludes rational analysis. They explore not just our inability to know ourselves as we would like to, but the compensatory and generally unacknowledged fictions to which we bind ourselves in our hunger for meaning—from the political, philosophical, social, and religious to the racial, sexual, personal, and familial. Lewis’s Shakespeare not only creates tragedies that exceed those written before them. Through his art, he also affirms and invigorates the kinds of knowing that are available to intelligent animals like us.
A major reevaluation of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art is essential reading for anyone interested in Shakespeare, tragedy, or the capacity of literature to help us navigate the perplexities of the human condition.
After many years at the University of Oxford, Rhodri Lewis moved to Princeton in 2018—where he teaches English and comparative literature. His new book, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, was a New Yorker Book of the Year for 2024, and for the duration of the 2025-26 academic year he will be a Guggenheim Fellow. Previous books include Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton UP 2017) and Language, Mind, and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge UP 2007). He is now at work on two projects: a biography of the great literary critic Frank Kermode, and a new edition (and translation) of Francis Bacon’s Wisdom of the Ancients.
The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast.
Recorded April 23, 2025
Facebook: / authorevents
Instagram: / flpauthorevents
Twitter/X: https://x.com/authorevents
The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.
