Evil and the Forms of Shakespeare’s Endings

Abstract

This essay argues that those of Shakespeare’s plays in which perpetrators of wrongdoing are initially unknown to fellow characters and then conclusively exposed – which is to say plays in which evils are spectacularly made known not only to an audience but to the characters within a play – would have provided a cathartic release for Reformation audiences newly confronted with the dismayingly two-steps forward one-step back nature of soteriological inquiry and identity. The increased prominence and Calvinist torque of theories of predestination and original sin, along with the corresponding prevalence of the notion of reprobacy, and in combination with the waning of pre-Reformation protocols of mitigating sin (e.g., “works”), rendered the naming of sin a peculiarly satisfying experience. In a culture in which one’s salvation or damnation was a secret ultimately known only to the deity, the revelation to characters of information known to an audience in advance of said characters would have made its theatrical dénouement a particularly charged dramatic moment.