Where does life end, and death begin? Where does being end? What does ‘being’ mean anyway? What does it mean to be nothing?

When Hamlet asks, ‘To be, or not to be’, he tries to imagine himself in a state of hypothetical annihilation. When Anthony botches his suicide in Anthony and Cleopatra, he is forced to recognise that though he can attempt to take himself to the threshold between life and death, it is not necessarily in his power to cross it. When Richard II says ‘whe’er I be / Nor I nor any man that but man is / With nothing shall be please till he be eased / With being nothing’, he conceives a state of existence as nothing which is not the same as non-being.

But being and non-being are not limited to life and death. Characters in plays have a sort of being that is not identical to the being of the actor, just as fictional characters have a sort of being that is not physical. This paper will examine the threshold between being and non-being in Shakespeare’s works by scrutinising the liminal moments between life and death, between play and audience, and between fiction and non-fiction.

Bio: Jessica Chiba is a PhD Candidate supervised by Professor Kiernan Ryan and Professor Andrew Bowie at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is currently researching Shakespeare and ontology (the study of being). Her secondary interest is in Japanese translations of Shakespeare.

This talk was part of a one-day conference 'Shakespearean Thresholds' organised by KiSSiT (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory) held at the Rose Theatre, Kingston on April 2, 2016. The session was chaired by Ildiko Solti.

See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_zbw7PgoAQ