While awaiting the U.S. Supreme Court ruling last night, a panic stricken American friend of mine phoned me, and said: "At one moment you think that anything is possible, and then the next you think it is all fated. Chaos or conspiracy. It is like some weird Greek tragedy. You feel as if the whole of future history is about to go down one road or the other." Being a pedant, I replied that while I personally thought the situation was more driven by the structure of political power than she did, the feeling she was talking about was really out of a Shakespearean form of tragedy and not a Greek form. Curiously enough, she didn't hang up.

I said, in Greek tragedy, it is always assumed, even before things have happened, that they were fated to happen. The specific circumstances are seen as part of the mocking machinery of the gods. Oedipus never says: why me? When things go wrong in Greek tragedy, you feel everything to be always in the grip of some powerful, inexorable machine.

In Shakespeare, we move towards modernity and the prospect of chaos. Now famously known as the "butterfly effect", in chaos (or complexity theory) an unstable system can be knocked onto radically different paths by very slight shifts in the initial conditions. For scientists, these shifts may or not be randomly interesting; but for the rest of us, when we can suddenly see that our lives may be radically altered by slight changes in the facts around us, the question arises: Why these facts? Why not others? Why have these facts happened, and not others?

Crucially, in Shakespearean tragedy, this sudden awareness of the possibly arbitrary nature of life happens as it happens -- the clock ticks on stage. We can see that the future might be different if we could change the present, and yet we have no control over the very conditions that are affecting decisions in the present, so it all seems at one moment a conspiracy and at exactly the same moment absurdly arbitrary -- this is what haunts Macbeth and many another Shakespearean figure. Why isn't now different? Why don't I have enough control to change now? In Shakespearean tragedy, you feel everything to be in the grip of some powerful, inexorable machine, and at exactly the same moment, you feel everything to be totally arbitrary. So that even if you feel a political conspiracy is happening, how has chaos brought it to the point where such a conspiracy can work? It is far more maddening than anything the Greeks came up with.

"Well," she finally said. "I think it is really baseball tragedy. My mother refused to go to the bathroom during the crucial Yankees-Mets game, and then it got so bad she had to go, and while she was out of the room, the series was lost. I have to go to the bathroom. Bye."

Two minutes later she phoned me back to say that the Supreme Court had handed down their verdict while she was on the toilet.