“This Most Human Predicament”

Abstract Cavell’s readings of Shakespeare’s tragedies center around the importance of avoiding choosing between understanding characters and understanding their words, as well as around the preconceptions about literature and the desires for mastery that seem to force this properly avoidable choice on readers. The way forward to understanding Shakespeare is to articulate how his major tragic protagonists bear anxieties, fears, fantasies, and desires in which we partake. We might come better to understand this fact about ourselves by acknowledging their tragic courses as affine to our own. Doing this will require giving up the posture of neutral mastery in reading and instead opening oneself to being read by the literary work.