Note 8 — SHAKESPEARE AD INFINITUM

“Goethe, in a thoughtful essay, Shakespeare und kein Ende, written many years later than his famous criticism of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister, says that the distinction between the two [ancient and modern drama] is the difference between sollen and wollen, that is, between must and would. He means that in the Greek drama the catastrophe is foreordained by an inexorable Destiny, while the element of free will, and consequently choice, is the very axis of the modern. The definition is conveniently portable, but it has its limitations. Goethe’s attention was too exclusively fixed on the fate tragedies of the Greeks, and upon Shakespeare among the moderns. In the Spanish drama, for example, custom, loyalty, honor, and religion are as imperative and as inevitable as doom. In the Antigone, on the other hand, the crisis lies in the character of the protagonist.”—James Russell Lowell, Shakespeare Once More.