As I re-read Troilus and Cressida, I find myself thinking back on Hamlet. Well, not so much Hamlet, but the podcast I had discussing Hamlet with Amir Khan, who has written a book, Counterfactual Thinking and Shakespearean Tragedy, due out later this year from Edinburgh University Press. A chapter of that book has been printed in the current issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, under the title “My Kingdom for a Ghost: Counterfactual Thinking and Hamlet.” If you remember back to that podcast, Amir talked about how our expectations are set by our first reading (or experience) of a play. But what if, he asked, if events in the play didn’t play out like they did… would our expectations be met?
My question is what if that experience is a priori to the reading, from before and independent of that reading?
Continue reading “Contra/Predictive Expectations and Questions”