contingency & offstage action

Much of the force of Elizabethan tragedy is in the disappointment of expectations. In renaissance tragedies, at least in Elizabethan ones, we find a great deal of wavering between two possibilities, two parallel sets of expectations. Even if we know which one to settle on—because of the title The Tragedy of X, say—the other remains very real to us. Take as examples Romeo and Juliet or Othello: these keep their alternate endings vivid to the last minute—in the latter case, even after the last minute--hence every critic of the play has to ask why Othello believes Iago; why, that is, the beautifully elaborated possibility of a happy ending is not reached. As Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, "history is not what happened, it is what happened in the context of what might have happened." This dictum holds doubly in drama, even if the ontological status of that "might" is debatable; indeed, even if possibility is merely a simulacrum.

Unlike the Elizabethan theater, however, the Jacobean is not a theater of possibility. The weird, fatalistic worldview of the dramas we tend to call Jacobean (some actually written under Charles) has often been remarked upon, usually with lip-service to Calvinist theories of predestination. But this is an unsatisfactory hypothesis, since research has shown that the cultural consensus in the Elizabethan period was broadly Calvinist, and that Arminianism did not become church policy until the reign of James--if the period we are talking about was experiencing a shift, then, it was away from predestination, not towards it (cf. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists). Why, then, this modality in Jacobean tragedy?

I offer (dear readers) a theory. A key factor in striking a deterministic mood in tragedy might be the proportion of events that are narrated rather than shown--that is, events that happen offstage, and are described by characters afterwards (I count only those within the time scheme of the play; the events that happen before the it opens are, of course, necessarily and always narrated). This is as straightforward as a relation of past tense to present or future tense; Webster's tragedies, for instance, contain a very great number of offstage incidents over the course of a given play (murders, marriages, liasons) that are only afterwards recounted. Characters, then, must mourn the consequences of what has already happened--rather than deliberating on what will happen, or even what is happening, thereby creating a sense of plausible alternatives. There is, on the other hand, very little offstage action in Shakespeare (the most notable exceptions are battles, especially sea battles, and voyages, but this is partly a consideration of staging), and I can think of none at all in Marlowe (who is all wild, erratic possibility spinning off the rails of set courses).

One reason, and I think an important one, for this shift to the offstage in Jacobean drama is the degree to which its typical themes are illicit erotic encounters. Deaths could be staged, but incest, adultery, and rape of course could not. Insofar as the motif is sexual deviance (why this motif is another question, but it is one that has been often & well discussed), the playwright's hand is forced--determinism becomes a consequence of focusing on the most irreducibly private spheres. If The White Devil, then, treated events it was able to show, it might read a good deal more like Shakespeare. And if Othello were just Iago's account of events, and not their true (& innocent) appearance on stage, then conversely, it might read like Webster.

contingency & literary criticism

Two of the recent intellectual subfields I find especially interesting--possible worlds in philosophy and counterfactuals in history/historiography--are engaged in the same set of problems, problems surrounding the querying of contingency. Insofar as either of these subfields have influenced literary studies, it has been in terms of providing an ontology of fiction. Thinking of the novel as a sort of large-scale, messy thought experiment designed to test and reflect upon contingent truths is not unhelpful (though it presents serious challenges to mimesis, among other things; cf. Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds), but this approach works badly or not at all for other forms of literary art--poetry, say, or essays.

It would be more interesting, I think, to try to perform counterfactual analyses, and to try to arrive at a kind of awareness of contingency, within literary works themselves. We tend not to do this for very good reason: books present themselves as pure compounded necessity--but then, so does the past (whether everything that exists exists necessarily can be taken up in the comments section), and historians are less shy about trying to arrive at historical rules through manipulation of the contingent.

Literary critics do, of course, do this to some extent through the measurement of individual texts against generic or aesthetic rules; if done in an especially systematic way, we arrive at something like Franco Moretti's studies. This sort of method, at its best, often tends toward a sociology of literary history, which suggests that the study contingency and necessity comes to literary criticism by way of history (including genre history and so forth). What I would like to think about, and what I would like your views on, is whether we can come up with a way of thinking about the contingent on the level of the individual work or author. My exceedingly modest proposal is to consciously contrast (pretended) first and multiple readings of a work--or perhaps, the reading in time with the timeless (I don't mean, of course, the critic's own first reading of a text, but the imaginary first-reading perspective that critics adopt when pointing out 'the reader does not yet know X' and so forth). Critics often shift between these modes, but I rarely see the contrast noted explicitly or used as a methodological tool; this contrast is one way, I think, of generating a heuristic sense of contingency. I do hope, however, you can come up with something a bit less modest than this--and I will likewise endeavor.