Introduction

In William Shakespeare studies, immediacy breaks through as a version of Hegel’s good infinity, and it foments the unseemly propagation of spontaneism, embodiment and presentism. Shakespeare’s experience is always mediated, and tragedy in his work emerges when reconciliation with this fact dawns expediently on the not-unfallen, when occasion and opportunity arrive untimely, too often too early. When the experience of Shakespearean dialectic comes to an end, it is because it contingently comes to an accidental stop, not because the end is preemptively built into the early stages of the process. Hegel was keenly aware of the presence of an exterior historical matter that provoked an inherent disorganization in Shakespeare’s tragic plots. The resilience of this intractable material sets limits to the possibility of Shakespeare’s dramatic worlds.