2. Welcoming the Stranger

The chapter enlarges on the need for another person to perform the task of witness (i.e. the protagonist cannot bear witness to themselves), and the problems that this entails. Even a Greek chorus, formally positioned as witnesses to the tragic action, may be felt to fall short, as Antigone discovers in going to her death. The need for someone to tell one’s story is expressed by Richard II, Hamlet, and Othello as they approach their ends. How Desdemona listened to Othello’s life-story suggests what it means to find that need fulfilled. Desdemona was there responding to a person and a set of experiences radically alien to her; offering welcome to the stranger or foreigner figures what is involved in the act of tragic witness. This sometimes appears as tragedy’s manifest subject-matter: Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women, Albee’s A Delicate Balance, and the hazardous admission of the Furies into Athens at the end of Aeschylus’s Eumenides are discussed in this light.