“Night’s predominance or the day’s shame”: a Shakespearean constellation of the modern tragic

The chapter is concerned with Shakespeare’s drama, philosophy of the tragic, and political theology. The main plays considered are King John, Richard III, Richard II, Hamlet, and Macbeth. The chapter distances itself from a study of tragedy as a theatrical genre to highlight, instead, the philosophical concept of “modern tragic” in the selected tragedies and history plays. The theoretical and philosophical groundwork refers mainly to three authors: Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and Peter Szondi. The definition of “tragic” adopted here is an unresolved dialectic between necessity and impracticability, while the adjective “modern” qualifies and positions this dialectic in the intellectual aftermath of the Reformation. A textual analysis of my corpus brings forth Shakespeare’s awareness of the simultaneous necessity for and unfoundedness, inevitability, and arbitrariness of political orders. I argue that Shakespeare’s modern tragic awareness originates from the post-Reformation questioning of the traditional source of legitimacy of secular power–divine approval, guaranteed by the Roman Church–and the use of a peculiar paradoxical narrative. The latter is a secularization of Anglican actual righteousness, exemplified by Richard Hooker. Both issues are located throughout most of Shakespeare’s career. In the history plays, the relationship between monarchy and divinity increasingly deteriorates, and the “Tudor myth” introduces paradoxical temporality onstage. In Hamlet, reflection on the crisis and restoration of the political order in Denmark signals the aporia underlying action. In Macbeth, the idea of a meaningful history is questioned in consideration of the indifference of time towards man’s designs. In both Hamlet and Macbeth, the paradoxical temporalities staged become tragic in a modern sense. Finally, I contend that secularized paradoxical temporality is a mode of staging the modern tragic best explained through Schmitt’s and Benjamin’s views of exception.