Anticipation and Foreboding in Shakespeare’s Early Histories

Summary

It is strange that the role of anticipation and foreboding in Shakespearian drama has so far not received adequate attention and treatment. For here we find an important feature of Shakespeare’s dramatic art which is closely connected not only with the dramatist’s technique of preparation, but also with his art of characterization. It bears, too, on the composition and structure of his plays, since the peculiar function of anticipation and foreboding often consists in establishing subtle correspondences between earlier and later utterances or situations in the drama, or in binding together various threads of the action. Until now, however, the only aspect under which foreboding in Shakespeare’s drama has been studied connectedly seems to have been Shakespeare’s use of the supernatural. But the role played by foreboding is, with Shakespeare, in no way exhausted by his use of omen, prophecies and other portents which could be classified as more or less supernatural. And it is this very extension of the device of foreboding beyond the traditional realm of prophecy, omen, dream, etc., which makes a study of this particular feature so interesting and displays Shakespeare’s superiority over his contemporaries and predecessors in such a singular manner. For although we find anticipation and foreboding in all great dramatists, in Sophocles and Euripides as well as in Calderón and Ibsen, it can safely be said that with no other dramatist has this feature been turned to so manifold use and developed into such a refined and subtle instrument of dramatic art as with Shakespeare.