ABSTRACT
While tragic theater makes us ask what humans owe one another, it also gives us space to ask what we expect from God – or at least from a transcendent justice. If Shakespeare’s tragedies make such divine interrogations, readers and audiences ought to be slow to jump to theological conclusions. Rather than see the playwright as staging social processes of betrayal and familial demise at the expense of transcendent agency, this chapter argues that these processes for Shakespeare are shot through with transcendence. In fact, the way characters relate to what Cleopatra calls her “immortal longings” in part determines what sort of role they will play. Those who desire permanence and escape from time become victims, while those who play a “dilation game,” staying within temporality by denying transcendence, play the villains. Characters like Juliet and Othello long for eternal constancy, while Macbeth and Iago attempt to assert their own originality, remaking themselves without doubling or repeating an unstaged divinity.
