SOURCE: “Toys, Prologues and the Great Amiss: Shakespeare's Tragic Openings,” in Shakespearian Tragedy, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, pp. 3-30, Edward Arnold, 1984.

In the following essay, Allen comments on the diverse openings of eight plays—Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet—with particular emphasis on the degree to which the ending of each tragedy is inherent in its beginning. Allen apportions the fullest coverage to the opening scenes of Macbeth, which he judges to be the most dense and profound of all Shakespeare's beginnings.

The Greek cosmologists first brought the experience of human beginnings, centred as they must necessarily be around the experience of birth, to bear on the metaphysics of time and existence: When did the world begin? When did time begin? Did they begin together? What existed before them? How can there be a before...