Shakespeare’s Eschaton

• In Event: A Medieval Renaissance: The Example of Shakespeare

Abstract

For Frank Kermode, Lear and Macbeth marked the modern break from the medieval ‘Beatus tradition’ with a ‘sense of ending’ shaped by Shakespeare rather than Revelation. And yet Shakespeare’s endings not only reference endtime: they dramatize its structure of indefinite postponement. Consider how the pending judgment of Comedy of Errors is delayed through interminable farce; or how the foregone conclusion of revenge in Hamlet is notoriously forestalled. So this will be a paper about how the structure of the eschaton works its way into the form of Shakespeare’s drama (and sonnets) -- in the wake of the Doomsday plays, Everyman, and John Foxe’s “apocalyptic comedy,” Christus Triumphans.

Author

• Margreta de Grazia, University of Pennsylvania