Enter with Courage: Emergence and Ground in Shakespeare, Arendt, and Tillich

Abstract

Responding to the work of Juliane Vogel, this essay draws on Elizabethan stagecraft, Shakespearean dramaturgy, and philosophies of courage in order to analyze the forms of self-disclosure and new birth that accompany theatrical entrances. Across Shakespeare’s dramatic writing, risky circumstances prompt characters to enter situations that require courage from both actors and the characters they become. Drawing on Aristotle’s notions of dunamis (power, capacity) and energeia (actualization), Hannah Arendt finds courage in every movement into the dramatic field of self-disclosure, where agents entrust the impact and import of their deeds to the responses of others. In The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich presents courage as a confrontation with the indeterminacies of being; for Tillich, courage means affirming being in the face of nonbeing. From Aristotle and Shakespeare to Arendt and Tillich, courage names the dynamic surge into visibility, relationality, and provisional form that characterizes the entrance in Shakespearean drama and in the theater of life.