To Tell Whose Story?: Narrative Identity and its Discontents in Shakespeare

In a number of his plays Shakespeare appears to anticipate modern perceptions of the manner in which human beings live their lives as stories, structuring their experience and imbuing it with significance through what are essentially strategies of narrative elaboration, and by so doing constructing narrative identities for themselves which they seek to validate in the social world. At the same time, while illustrating the crucial role played by storytelling in the constitution of personal identity, so also does Shakespeare evince a profound awareness of the problematic implications inherent in the process of fashioning the self by such means. This essay examines the tragedies Hamlet and Othello from the point of view of the processes of narrative self-construction that are enacted within them, the workings of which are signalled, among other things, by the very deliberate ‘story’ motif that is a conspicuous feature of each. Particular attention is paid to the paradoxes latent in the conception of the self that such processes give rise to, and to the hazards they potentially entail both for the individual and for others.