Temporality Puts on Airs: Process, Purpose, and Poetry in Shakespeare’s Histories

Abstract

Shakespeare’s drive towards knowledge, and the dramatic realization of knowledge, led him constantly to invoke, monitor, and test to the limits of human comprehension the relationship between figure and ground, between “man” and “elements.” His problematizing of the natural attitude towards the elemental is perhaps most apparent in the great tragedies — especially in King Lear, where the radical instability of “nature” and its cognates is continuously in evidence — but the interrogation of the elements is at least as marked and important in the history plays, where prose and poetry mediate between process and purpose, successiveness and succession, between the apparently arbitrary successiveness of events and the resolution of the question of succession to the throne of England into the more or less consoling configurations of dynasty and national destiny.