This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

So is tragedy the genre in which the human’s capacity to affect his or her situation is most undermined? Questions of agency in tragedy are discussed in more detail in the chapter on Macbeth. Maybe the popularity of tragedy as an early modern form reflects this cultural interest. At the time of Shakespeare’s writing, philosophies of causation were on the move. They began to shift away from the providential, theocentric views of medieval Christianity – broadly, things happen because God says so – via Machiavelli’s unsentimental stress on human ingenuity and significance in The Prince (circulated widely in the second half of the sixteenth century), and emerged somewhere about the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (printed in 1651), where things happen because humans, individually and collectively, behave in particular self-interested