SOURCE: Hopkins, Lisa. “Tragic Marriage.” In The Shakespearean Marriage: Merry Wives and Heavy Husbands, pp. 133-60. London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998.

In the following essay, Hopkins regards marriage as the source of tragedy in Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello.

‘All comedies end with a marriage,’ said the maiden English teacher at my all girls' school, ‘and all tragedies begin with them.’ In the four great works of Shakespeare's central tragic period, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear, marriage functions as a site of stress, disruption and destruction of the individual identity. In three of the four plays, a marriage, or the arrangements for it, directly precipitate a disaster; as Joanna Montgomery Byles comments, ‘to some extent, it is the denial of Eros and the destructiveness of family attachments which largely contribute to the fate of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear’.¹ Beginning where the comedies...