Doing Things with Paradoxes: Shakespearean Impersonations

The chapter discusses the functions of figures of contradiction in their various rhetorical and logical articulations in a number of Shakespearean tragedies, arguing that it is the pragmatic context of drama that produces paradoxical effects even when language is not technically paradoxical. In the tragedies this articulation becomes especially complex when paradoxical utterances interrogate the coexistence of being, being-other and non-being, redefining the relation between the ontology and the epistemology of Shakespearean tragedy. The chapter focuses on questions of selfhood and impersonation with regard to theatre and mimesis, as well as identity fabrication. Special attention is paid to selected passages in Hamlet and Othello, where a whole gamut of figures of contradiction are employed to explore the meaning of simulation in ways that reconfigure the boundaries of self and reality.