Tragic Closure and Tragic Disclosure

Abstract

After Antony has run on his sword thinking to ‘o’ertake’ Cleopatra, one of the guardsmen who discovers him proclaims that ‘time is at his period’ (Antony and Cleopatra iv. xiv. 107). The soldier, of course, wishes to indicate the enormous impact that Antony’s death will have, but clearly the passing of even one of the triple pillars of the world cannot bring time to a stop. The open-ended structures of Shakespeare’s history plays declare the lie of the soldier’s perspective. The history plays acknowledge the uninterruptible process of history itself, exerting pressure upon an audience to recognize the play’s formal limits as arbitrary and contingent. Yet, like the soldier, Shakespeare’s tragedies wilfully ignore historical time. The tragic process does indeed bring time to ‘his period’ — not the historical time that is the significant time of the history plays but le temps humain, time as it is directly and immediately experienced by the individual.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause — Richard Wilbur, ‘Year’s End’