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Erschienen in:

2016 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

1. Time, Choice, and Consequences in Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy

verfasst von : Rebecca Bushnell

Erschienen in: Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on how classical and Shakespearean tragedy engages us in a present “thick” with past and future when it stages a crisis, a moment of present decision in which everything changes. It argues that understanding tragic temporality as multidirectional than merely linear opens up new ways of thinking about how choice operates in present time. The chapter analyzes the relationship of choice in time to character and consequences in a small set of plays: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles’s Theban plays, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet, which have served as powerful paradigms for the construction of tragic temporality and crisis. The chapter’s first part concerns the relationship between choice and dramatic character, considering how tragic character can be defined through choice, anticipating the deconstruction of character formation that takes place in videogames. The second part also questions the assumption that the tragic protagonist’s decision is constrained by the power that human beings have called the gods, fate, or destiny. Positing that the present moment of decision may still be radically contingent, this chapter asserts that in Greek and Shakespearean tragedy choice in an enacted crisis can undermine as well as reinforce the kind of determinism that we conventionally associate with those plays.

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Nächstes Kapitel Tragic Adaptation and Performance: Undoing the Play

For an important meditation on tragic structure and endings, see Kermode 2000. See also Snyder, Chap. 1 and Wagner, Chap. 2.

See also Kirkland, who comes at the issue from the point of fate/free will (Kirkland 2014).

Also see Kermode, who follows how, through our fictions, we draw out of chronos, the undifferentiated stream of time, the kairos or the crisis; then the chronos time that is “simply successive becomes charged with past and future” (45). So, he observes, “the moments we call crises are both ends and beginnings” (96) (Kermode 2000).

See de Romilly: “Each action is made to bear on the whole history of the house of Atreus; the weight of the past is felt as heavier, the anxiety as more devastating, the issue as of more meaning” (13) (de Romilly 1968). See also Widzisz for a valuable summary of the work to date on temporality in the Oresteia (Widzisz 2012).

See Nussbaum on Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice Iphigenia as it is represented in the chorus at the play’s beginning: “Agamemnon is allowed to choose: that is to say, he knows what he is doing […] nothing forces him to choose one course rather than another. But he is under necessity in that those alternatives include no very desirable options” (34) (Nussbaum 2001).

Citations are from Aeschylus, Septem Quae Super Sunt; translations are my own (Aeschylus 1972).

See Widzisz on how here “Agamemnon finds himself suddenly at the cross-currents of two identity shifts” (57) (Widzisz 2012).

Compare Jean-Paul Sartre’s adaptation of this moment in The Flies, where the decision is seen as coming as a coup de foudre: “Suddenly, out of the blue, freedom crashed down on me and swept me off my feet[…] And there was nothing left in heaven, no right or wrong, or anyone to give me orders” (118) (Sartre 1989).

For an important account of the gender dynamics of The Oresteia, see Zeitlin, “Dynamics” (Zeitlin 1978).

See Hutchinson on the “aspect” of time in Sophocles (Hutchinson 1999).

Citations are from Sophocles, Fabulae; translations are my own unless indicated otherwise (Sophocles 1975).

See also Segal, Oedipus Tyrannus: “He is both free and determined, both able to choose and helpless in the face of choices that he has already made in the past or circumstances (like those of his birth) over which he has no power of choice” (76) (Segal 1993).

The Greek is ambiguous here, in implying compulsion, but without designating the source of the compulsion.

See Segal, Oedipus Tyrannus: “Oedipus does not have a tragic flaw […]. Oedipus’s haste and irascibility at crucial moments […] contribute to the calamity but are not sufficient reasons for it nor its main cause” (76) (Segal 1993).

See Bushnell, “Time and History,” for a short summary of the adaptation of the unities in England in the sixteenth century (Bushnell 1990). In an article on Shakespeare’s disdain for the unities, Ernest Schanzer describes Prospero’s self-harassment in the observation of time as the playwright’s “last thrust in his scattered skirmishes against that bloated, tyrannical upstart, the doctrine of the unity of time” (61) (Schanzer 1975).

Kermode has observed of Shakespearean tragedy, “It offers imagery of crisis, of futures equivocally offered, by prediction and by action, as actualities; as a confrontation of human time with other orders, and the disastrous attempt to impose limited designs upon the time of the world” (88) (Kermode 2000).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare (1974).

For more extensive consideration of time in Shakespearean tragedy see Kastan (1982), Wagner (2014), Waller (1976), and Sypher (1976).

There has been a vast amount of scholarship on time in Macbeth, and my own observations just scratch the surface: for the most recent articles, which also provide references to earlier scholarship, see Macdonald (2010) and Marchitello (2013). See also Rayner, Chap. 3 (Rayner 1994).

All citations from Macbeth are from The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies (1997).

See Sinfield’s discussion of character criticism and the post-structuralist critique (Sinfield 1992). See Yachnin and Slights for a counterargument for the function of “character” as a “valid analytic category” (3) with a focus on theater and performance, and where an interest in character trumps plot (7) (Yachnin and Slights 2008). See also Mazer on the issues related to character and performance (Mazer 2015).

See Rayner, on the Weird Sister as figures of the potentiality of the verb “do” without an object, where “I’ll do” is “both obdurately closed to negotiation and indefinitely open” (61) (Rayner 1994).

See also Everett: “the play leads us unusually often to think of it in terms of the laws of time, and to call Hamlet, if we wish, a Time Play” (119); she says of Hamlet that he is “always potential and always too late” (123) (Everett 1977).

All quotations from Hamlet are from the Arden edition, ed. Thompson and Taylor (2016).

Compare Barker on Hamlet: “At the centre of Hamlet, in the interior of his mystery, there is, in short, nothing” (37) (Barker 1995).

Reacting against the new historicist and cultural materialist image of the early modern socially constructed self, Katherine Maus has usefully focused on this period’s obsession with differentiating the “private” and “public” self (Maus 1995).

See Rayner on how we might think of fatality in Hamlet as “the limits of the game in which rules constrain action but do not dictate how the game is played out. That is left to a combination of chance and skill: […] Plot is the evidence of the fatality of the game” (119–120) (Rayner 1994). See also Costikyan on the conditions of openness and uncertainty in games (Costikyan 2013).

Aeschylus. Septem Quae Supersunt Tragoedias, ed. Denys Page. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Print.

Barker, Francis. The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection. 2nd edn. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Print.

Bushnell, Rebecca W. Time and History in Early English Classical Drama. In Law, Literature, and the Settlement of Regimes. Proceedings of the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought, ed. Gordon Schochet. Vol. 2. Washington, DC: Folger Institute, 1990. 73–86.

Costikyan, Greg. Uncertainty in Games. Reprint edition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013. Kindle.

De Romilly, Jacqueline. Time in Greek Tragedy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968. Print.

Everett, Barbara. Hamlet: A Time to Die. Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977): 117–124.CrossRef

Hutchinson, G.O. Sophocles and Time. In Sophocles Revisited: Essays Presented To Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 47–72. Print.

Kastan, David Scott. Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time. Hanover, N.H: University Press of New England, 1982. Print.CrossRef

Kermode, Frank. Introduction to Hamlet. In The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. 1135–1140. Print.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kindle.

Kirkland, Sean D. Tragic Time. In The Returns of Antigone: Interdisciplinary Essays, eds. Tina Chantel and Sean. D. Kirkland. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. 51–68. Print.

Macdonald, Julia. Demonic Time in Macbeth. Ben Jonson Journal 17:1 (2010): 76–96.CrossRef

Marchitello, Howard. Speed and the Problem of Real Time in Macbeth. Shakespeare Quarterly 64:4 (2013): 425–448.CrossRef

Maus, Katherine Eisaman. Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Print.

Mazer, Cary M. Double Shakespeares: Emotional-Realist Acting and Contemporary Performance. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015. Print.

Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print.CrossRef

Rayner, Alice. To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Print.CrossRef

Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays, trans. Lionel Abel. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Kindle.

Schanzer, Ernest. Shakespeare and the Doctrine of the Unity of Time. Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975): 57–62.

Segal, Charles. Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge. New York: Twayne, 1993. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. In The Arden Shakespeare, eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. 3rd series. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Print.

Sinfield, Alan. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Print.

Sophocles. Fabulae, ed A.C. Pearson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Print.

Sypher, Wylie. The Ethic of Time: Structures of Experience in Shakespeare. New York: Seabury Press, 1976. Print.

Wagner, Matthew. Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time. New York: Routledge, 2014. Print.

Waller, Gary F. The Strong Necessity of Time: The Philosophy of Time in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Literature. The Hague: Mouton De Gruyter, 1976. Print.

Widzisz, Marcel Andrew. Chronos on the Threshold: Time, Ritual, and Agency in the Oresteia. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012. Print.

Yachnin, Paul, and Jessica Slights. eds. Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance and Theatrical Persons. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.

Zeitlin, Froma. The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia. Arethusa 11 (1978): 149–175.

Titel: Time, Choice, and Consequences in Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy
verfasst von: Rebecca Bushnell
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Buch: Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-58525-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-58526-4

Copyright-Jahr: 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58526-4_1