Time, Choice, and Consequences in Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy

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.