Thomas de Quincey Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Charles J. Rzepka

Critical Essay by Charles J. Rzepka

SOURCE: “The ‘Dark Problem’ of Greek Tragedy: Sublimated Violence in De Quincey,” in The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 29, No. 2, Spring, 1998, pp. 114-20.

In the following essay, Rzepka contends that De Quincey's portraits of violence are deeply influenced by his reading of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy.

“The Greek Tragedy is a dark problem,” announces Thomas De Quincey at the beginning of his essay, “Theory of Greek Tragedy” (X, 342),¹ the problem being, first, how to distinguish between Greek and Modern, or “Shakespearean,” tragedy, and secondly, how to make this distinction intelligible to the un-Greeked, middle-class audience of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in February, 1840. De Quincey, an adept popularizer, solves both problems by nesting Greek Tragedy within the framework of a Shakespearean example universally familiar to the literate classes of England: the “play within a play” of Hamlet, which he likens, in turn, to a painting within a painting:

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