Shakespeare and the Idea of the Future

SHAKESPEARE AND THE IDEA OF THE FUTURP CLIFFORD LEECH It may, as so often, be as well to begin with Aristotle. Here, then, is a famous passage from The Poetics: We have laid it down that a tragedy is an llTiitation of an action that is complete in itself, as a whole of some magnitude; for a whole may be of no magnitude to speak of. Now a whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something else. either as its necessary or usual consequent. and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it.1 For all its apparent redundancy, this passage can be seen as the keystatement for the Aristotelian concept of drama, presenting it as a form of writing in which every event, every moment after the first, is the necessary or probable consequent of its predecessor and, until the last term in the series, the immediate cause of its successor.' This approaches a deterministic view of tragedy, but we should notice that Aristotle is prepared to let the mode of causation be a "probable" rather than a "necessary" one. But here I am anxious to draw attention to the ideas conveyed by the words "beginning" and "end" : "A beginning is that which is not necessarily after anything else"; "an end" has "nothing else after it". Now, the only kind of dramatist who has used such absolute beginnings and endings is the mediaeval writer of miracle plays. If you begin with the creation and end with the last judgment, you can claim to have dramatized the whole story of Time, which is not part of Eternity though, for its own duration, co-existent with it. But no moment within the boundaries of Time can be, absolutely, beginning or end. Indeed the Greek dramatists that Aristotle ineVitably had in mind were, as far as beginnings were concerned, always ready to underline the fact that events preceding the beginning of the play were highly influential on the series of events they were dramatiZing. The play that Aristotle thinks of most often, Oedipus the King, exemplifies as well as any the way the "'This paper was given at the ACUTE Conference at the University of British Columbia on June 16. 1965. dramatist makes the audience look back: years before the action begins, Oedipus had killed his father and married his mother, and before that had lied from Corinth to escape from the guilt the oracle had promised; and anterior to all these things was the attempt of Laius and Jocasta to nullify another message from the supernatural world, by giving the child Oedipus to death. At the end of the play, moreover, the betterinformed members of the audience would know of subsequent events in Thebes and Athens, and would not be able to shut this knowledge from their minds: as they saw the blinded Oedipus under Creon's control, they would be bound to think of the later exile, the paradox by which great guilt and great suffering could make a man peculiarly holy, the irony of Antigone's choice and of Creon's administration of the law. Yet here, it must be emphasized, we are not dealing with a trilogy. Each of the Theban plays of Sophocles is an independent drama, written at a different period of his life. Each of them, nevertheless, looks backward , and each of the two Oedipus plays ineVitably makes the audience look forward. We may say, of course, that, although the dramatist cannot have an absolute beginning or ending, he can and must choose as his startingpoint the opening of a new phase in a course of events, and can conclude when that phase is completed. It was the divinely sent plague in Thebes that initiated the series of revelations concerning the King's past, and the play ends when the revelations have done their work, when the King is un-kinged and afraid to die. The dramatization of such a phase...