Tragic heroes and heroines, as Macbeth makes so abundantly clear, are like people trying never to sleep. They are people who cannot interrupt themselves or be interrupted. They are people who have refused the benefits of giving up, or even of hesitation, people for whom giving up feels like giving up everything.

We may not, say, need to think of our lives in terms of losses and gains, or profit and loss, as the phrase ‘giving up’ induces us to do, thereby reinforcing a much-cherished cultural norm. We may not need to lose our lives in order to find them; we may just be able to go on finding them (mourning may not be the thing we most want to do, or the