Prospero’s planet

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The original title of this book is: Prospero’s Planet: Critical Quandaries around Shakespeare’s Last Play,

by Andrei Zlătescu Copyright © 2014 by Publica. All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-606-8360-77-5

Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naționale a României ZLĂTESCU, ANDREI Prospero’s Planet: Critical Quandaries around Shakespeare’s Last Play / Andrei Zlătescu. Bucureşti : Publica, 2014 Bibliogr.

ISBN 978-606-8360-77-5 008

EDITORI:

DIRECTOR EXECUTIV:

REDACTOR:

DESIGN:

Cătălin Muraru Silviu Dragomir Doru Someșan

Bogdan Ungureanu

Alexe Popescu

DTP:

Răzvan Nasea

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 9 Author’s word: Ars politica or just courtly art? ����������������������������������������������� 11 Part I: Preparing „The Tempest“ ��������������������������������������������������������������������� 19 1. Beyond Aristotle’s Poetics: „unities“ and their new functions in the play �������������������������������������������������������������� 27 2. Historical Interpretations; The Tempest’s baffling transitivity ������������ 31 3. Perspectives of the 18th and 19th centuries: the social mission of the canon ������������������������������������������������������������� 35 4. Victorian criticism: Coleridge, Hazlitt, and the critical aftermath ������� 39 5. Victorian fin‑de‑siècle: Shakespearean articulations of the British Empire ������������������������������ 47 6. Interpretations that matter: modern commentaries and creative efforts ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 51 7. The play’s dynamic adverbials: how things should be made to happen �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 55 8. Contemporary readings: learning from the clash of cultures �������������� 59 9. Examining the colonial mindset: …pygmies, satyrs, cannibals and Amazons �������������������������������������������������������������������������� 63 10. Kermode’s milestone: the imaginary concord between past and future ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 69

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Part II: Theoretical updates ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 73 1. The discursive production of „selves“ ���������������������������������������������������� 75 2. Mimetic perplexities: towards a post‑historical analysis �������������������� 89 3. Girard, Gans and the theme of ritual sacrifice versus dissociation ������ 97 4. More phenomenological clustering: power and the spectacle of analogies ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 117 Excursus: Mircea Eliade’s „archetypal persuasive argument“ �������������������� 123 Part III: Prospero’s theatrical lesson ������������������������������������������������������������ 149 1. The planet on stage ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 161 2. The creative denouement ��������������������������������������������������������������������� 169 3. A closing word. Magic time as proper instans ������������������������������������� 179 Notes �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 185 Bibliography ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 217 About the Author ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 227

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In memory of my teacher, Amilcare Iannucci.

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Acknowledgments

This study would not have been possible without the firm reassurance given to me by the late Director of The Humanities Center at The University of Toronto, Prof. Amilcare Iannucci, a most thoughtful defender of the writer’s early take on The Tempest. Prof.

Corneliu Mihai Ionescu (University of Bucharest), my much missed teacher at The Faculty of Letters (during the early nineties), deserves a late word of praise here, as one whose unique gift triggered my passion for hermeneutics, a discipline that has proven invaluable for this student of Shakespeare’s folios ever since.

I owe a great deal of courage and inspiration to Prof. Jonathan Hart (University of Alberta), whose patience, consistent intellectual support and admirable supervision throughout my final doctoral year made possible the successful compilation of the present work.

My special thanks go to my first doctoral mentor, Prof. Roseann O’Reilly Runte (now at Carleton University), whose course on utopian fiction has been decisive for my early years of formation at Toronto’s Victoria College. A charismatic presence in my years of formation at The Graduate Center for Comparative Literature with The University of Toronto was Prof. Lubomir Doležel, whose graduate courses have determined my deep interest for the semantics of fictional worlds – a discipline whose fundamentals are visible in the underlying theory of this study. Prof. Brian Stock (University of Toronto), one of the leading scholars in Augustine Studies, motivated me to study Early Christian Thought from scholarly angles, which were to influence my readings of Medieval English culture.

Owing to Prof. Christine Sutherland (University of Calgary), a fine

Acknowledgments Prospero’s Planet

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specialist in English Reformation literature, my timely drafts on Shakespeare’s London have benefitted from the comments of a thorough critical reviewer. Unquestionably, I am acknowledging a great debt of gratitude to my mentor and friend, Prof. Călin‑Andrei Mihăilescu (Western University), whose originality and erudition have inspired my life‑long commitment to the study of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory. Profs. Adrian Titieni and Nicu Mandea (National University of Theatre and Film – Bucharest) are the addressees of my genuine appreciations for their friendly responses to my scholarly projects regarding the Elizabethan culture – since my return to my homeland, Romania, in 2012.

Last but not least, my heartfelt appreciation goes to my family, for their patience, reassurance, and solidarity during the decade of exploration and obstinate search associated with my literary studies.­ The Author June 15, 2014, Bucharest

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Prospero’s Planet Acknowledgments

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Author’s word: Ars politica or just courtly art?

Shakespeare’s last major play, and one of the strangest dramatic works of its epoch, might be better deciphered when analyzed in relation to its exceptional festive destiny. Elizabeth Stuart’s engagement to Frederick V Elector Palatine, the heir of the Bohemian crown, was such a unique occasion where the language of the occult philosophy was employable within the rhetorical figures of a political allegory, one that would be read by a contemporary anthropologist as a lesson in charismatic leadership. Given the encomiastic context, Shakespeare’s scenic „demonstration“ needs to operate with symbolic paradoxes, considering that the said engagement branded a political alliance between royal houses with common interests, but different „metaphysical agenda“. Thus, The Tempest’s unique styling can be understood a result of a series of hazardous circumstances that can make the first productions of this play part of a theory of „rare events“, where none of the traditional hermeneutic branches can give a satisfactory account of the play’s hybridness. Here, the dependence upon former rhetorical and esthetic contexts becomes scanty, and originality needs to be defined as part of an innovative axiology, which places this play in an original hermeneutical framework, based on the quasi‑absence of historical truth and on the subsequent replenishment of the social need for meaning in the substitutive presence of the Crown’s restorative glamour.­ From the theological and spiritual perspective of the Middle Ages to the political anthropology of history, Shakespeare’s heroes

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stop at each station of the journey towards modernity, denouncing the inconsistency of the Medieval episteme and advocating for new public rituals aided by theatrical effects. And when the Elizabethan spectator chooses the magic of the old symbols, he / she presumably pays little attention to historical conformity.1 Elizabethan audiences may have indulged themselves in the facile enjoyment of their emotions, and their expectations might have been entirely fulfilled by the Shakespearean warriors’ allegorical disputes. And if Shakespeare often misapprehends the historical chronicle for the sake of representative coherence, the new drama’s hidden blueprint becomes evident once the Critique re‑discovers it within its thematic and structural progression: the young Shakespeare’s quest for a common denominator between the language of drama and England’s half‑mythical history, given in his ambition to stage England’s „quasi‑biblical history“, is counterbalanced by the late Shakespeare’s propensity towards unconventional theatrical forms of expression. The connoted abandonment of classical teleologizing techniques represents a gradual move in Shakespeare’s historical theatre: as Hart shows in Theater and World, the thematic transgression of Christian agency did not occur explicitly until the histories in The Second Tetralogy. Throughout his career as a dramatist, Shakespeare showed a constant preoccupation for the modus proper of depicting England’s history in conjunction with the rules of classical drama. Elizabethan century culture took into account a multitude of sources that qualify as common loci of dramatic representation: among them, Hart writes, were „the Senecan reworking of the story of the house of Atreus“, based upon the classical tragedies of Aeschilus, Sophocles and Euripdes; „the miracle and morality plays: the humanist drama about politics; and the history plays from about 1580 to the closing of the theatres in London.“2 The classical repository of satyr plays certainly offered Shakespeare occasions for transgressing the Aristotelian conventions, since their mixture of sophistication and baldness, bravery

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and satire, gravity and wit „could occasionally involve burlesque and tragic myths.“ 3 Beyond, the bard’s unique position in Elizabethan London is that of an aspiring playwright who is bound to compromise between theatrical modalities associated with antagonistic theological and historical accents. „Shakespeare’s history faces the difficulty and obtains the advantages of dramatic representation, so that although it may share characteristics with epic and non‑dramatic representations it can never face identical problems“, writes Hart.4 Evidently, in writing his historical plays, Shakespeare made use of solid primary sources, such as Holinshed and Froissart. But Shakespeare’s reliance upon of medieval chronicles was supplemented by a more creative insight into the classical plot and dramatic conventions of the Aeschylian trilogy, whose Atrean tragedy was a vivid motif of medieval and Renaissance moral and historical narratives. „How can a playwright shape and cut off time, write a history or a story about the past, when time or history continues?“ Hart asks rhetorically in Theater and World.

The self‑reflexivity of the Second Tetralogy, where the „generic friction“ rules, is analyzed in relation with the birth of meta‑theatricality: This self‑reflexivity and self‑critical language may contribute to the problems that characters and critics have of deciding the significance of history, the nature of kingship, and the relation of public and private in these plays. The works question themselves and lead to generic instability in the history play when it most needs order. Henry V and the tetralogy it tries to end debate the possibility of the history play and of history and lead toward the self‑reflexive debate of the problem plays.5

The bard’s positioning to classical English history took into consideration the ideological tenets of English Reformation, and conflated these with the „protochronist“ readings of English history typical of the emergent Tudor myth, „in which England is

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punished – Hart writes – for the deposition of Richard the Second until Richmond can unite the Red and White Roses and so redeem the broken country.“6 It is probable that the formative accents present in each of the four history dramas of Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy were articulated in response to the omnipresent succession debate in Elizabethan history. To Shakespeare’s viewers, including the Queen herself, plays like Richard II, Henry IV – Part One, and Henry IV – Part Two, Henry V could have offered pretexts of reflection with regard to the future of Tudors and the Albion’s future.

A current theme of recent Shakespeare scholars associates the displacement and disparagement of the king’s two bodies. The complex applications of the alleged „migration of the holy“ 7 and the subsequent translocation of the mythical privileges of kingship from myth to ideological attributions remain a marginal edge of my demonstration. Shakespeare’s history plays discover the disenchanting semantics of secularization; alternatively, they invent ways of reassurance between contemporary English history and teleological models: Unlike Corpus Christi plays, the histories in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy do not contain constant reassurances of Christ’s agency. … In these plays he often focuses on immediate political and human concerns, implies that English history will continue, and suggests that all literature can be seen as a fall when observed from the point of view of the Bible, so that all unbiblical writing is words; if the Bible is viewed as the supertext, literature is subsumed in the triumph of humankind in the mercy and grace of Christ. My focus assumes the irony of human ignorance or blindness, the middle earth of Augustine’s sixth age. No direct intervention or participation occurs in the Second Tetralogy. Ultimately, the premise, the frame of reference, origin and end determine meaning in history.8

„Elder“ Shakespearean kings had already summoned the specters of political absolutism throughout their political dilemmas.

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Inevitably, Shakespeare rewrote the history of Richards and Henrys, often making innovations suitable for an empirical political philosophy, in which the legitimacy of the ruler was made dependent on both natural right and knowledge of either Machiavellian or „magic“ strategies of state control. In his Introduction to Henry IV, Irving Ribner comments that „the Elizabethans made much of the distinction between private and public virtues and the public virtues which enable Henry to remedy the insufficiencies of Richard’s reign are evident from his first appearance“9; accordingly, the test of a good king is his ability to maintain civil order. At this point, Shakespeare’s realism still stood far away from any cynical determination. The moral insights of Henry IV indicated the ethical stand proper to the true monarch: this royal virtue can be described as a private knowledge of history making, a secret code of morality known only by princely blood and bound to its paradoxical cast on history’s stage (namely the embodiment of immortality provided through the Christian mandate).

Predictably enough, Hal’s reformation to the suit of kinship equaled his capacity for self‑mastery. Unpredictably, however, the prince’s political wisdom occurred as a reversal of the frail self into the supra‑personal body of his lineage (unlike Ferdinand’s evolution, carefully mastered by Prospero). Hal’s gesture of seizing the crown from the dying father’s pillow showed that his royal role had been voluntarily assumed and secretly rehearsed in the fiction of regicide. In Hal’s case, the true royalty equaled the repression of this fic‑ tion, the cured heritage of his father’s body politic. Nonetheless, the public miracle of Hal’s lawfulness required a personal sacrifice: the prince’s genuine affections. Instead, the art of survival on England’s throne challenged the public expectation, voiding the specter of any future conspiracy against the kingdom’s body. Consequently, Hal’s repudiation of Falstaff and his rehabilitation of Lord Justice granted the new king a different symbolic ancestry. From then on, he would be fathered by Justice, replacing his «real» genealogy with an allegorical tree of symbolic ancestry.

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Having speculated to the limit the chain of disasters that followed Richard’s death, Shakespeare built anew a historical drama that understood history as a stage of action–a disaffected platform, where traditional order could no longer hold for cosmic harmony.

The new morality of statesmanship, as revealed by The English Cycle, allowed Elizabethans to conceptualize the monarch’s ability to calculate his strengths and weaknesses on disparaging grounds.

A typical example used in Shakespeare contemporary studies is that of Henry V’s ascension to the crown. Oscillating between the tragic posture and the vile grimace, Hal’s reformation as a future king involved straightening his individual shape in order to adapt a symbolic body of shattered lawfulness. Henry IV appeared as a king embarrassed by the historicity he had to fight against, once having admitted his own part in the initial act of retaliation. „The revolution of times“ rendered uncertain the meaning of justice, and eventually foreordained crime in the name of political cohesion: with Richard alive, surrounded by factionalists, Bolingbroke might not have fulfilled his own symbolic mandate; or, better said, might not have met his symbolic body, the nation undivided. As Hart notes in Theater and World, „the kings of the Second Tetralogy all wrestle with their consciences.“10­ Necessity ruled on Shakespeare’s historical stage, absorbing the symbolic registers of power within its convoluted logic. Thus, for the king’s performance, which was bound to simulating the incorruptible body’s immortality, the theatrical monarch had to incorporate Christian prerogatives and repress alternatives. Otherwise, his reign may have confirmed itself ineffective, while disclosing its tyrannical side: however, the metaphysical drama of Henry’s personal guilt remained a secondary issue when compared to the possibility of political failure. Noticeably, Shakespearean monarchs are illustrations of the symbolic and historic paradoxes of legitimacy, when the state of exception justifies either the separation of the two notions or their reassessment as part of new conflations. In this

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context, Richard McCoy (Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation, 2003) analyses the deep cultural resonance of Reformation debates around Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist.

McCoy suggests that the dawn of the Reformation in England determined a „migration of the holy“ from the Savior’s real presence in the Catholic Mass to the „animating and redemptive royal presence“ of the Tudor kings. He also describes the emerging culture of modernity as increasingly divertive in relation with the understanding of sacredness, whose absence from recent historical experience corresponds to an alternative internalization of sacred space, where imagination is designated as the new place of sacred communion.11­ It is finally The Tempest that refines these proceedings beyond the stereotypes that held for the action of fate on stage, and this late aesthetic revolution, granting the character an unprecedented degree of autonomy, can also qualify as the seed of a new political axiology. In conjoining the traditionally divergent conventions of magic ritual and tragic drama, Shakespeare’s last major play is built on a modern and esoteric logic of episodes typical of the „theatre of absolution.“ This has been carved as an original syntagm in my work, where I employ an original term that aims for the proper denomination of the play’s unique denouement. Hypnosis‑centered, the social construction of reality envisaged by Prospero could be read as a prefiguring metaphor of Louis XIV’s absolutist reign, in anticipation of this period’s understanding of the ways in which collective desires and certainties can be programmed. Given the historical and philosophical horizon of my analysis, corresponding to the emergent years and period of the Baroque era, I will identify the modern art of statesmanship’s semantic frame in the narrative conventions of the „magic theatre“, a drama whose meta‑rhetorical agencies and mimetic constructs find inspiration from the postulations of intersubjective magic. Having abandoned belief in the teloi of history, the enlightened politician of Shakespeare’s last major

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play will be shown to consciously construct social meaning (i.e., systems of constraints) in ways analogous to the rules of narrative composition and dramatic performance. Furthermore, in accord with the Adornian critical tradition, embodied ­language in action will be considered as the essence of statesmanship. In all likelihood, in Shakespeare’s late theatre, the question of representa­tion takes centre stage in The Tempest and offers the subject a new habitat­ whose immanence does no longer need transcendental support or transport.

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Part I

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Preparing „The Tempest“

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With the first representation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, English theatre opened its stage to an uncommon event in the history of dramatic intrigue. At the beginning of June 1609, nine ships departed from England. Six hundred colonists had just embarked, heading for the recently founded American settlement of Virginia. Seven weeks into the voyage, a hurricane dispersed the convoy and pushed the Sea Venture, one of the frigates, to another latitude than that of its destination. After losing sight with its escort, the frigate was considered lost, once the hurricane abated down. The badly damaged boat reached – with no human losses–the Bermudas, a place reputed to be a stormy Hell, inhabited by harmful spirits and fairy‑tale monsters. In the following nine months, under the captain’s guidance, the colonists, who seemed to have enjoyed their seclusion on the Robinsonian island, built a new ship of indigenous timber. The new boat reached Jamestown

by May, 1610, after sailing northward for two weeks. The experience of colonists provoked rumors in new and old England, and, within a few months, became the favorite subject at Court. William Strachey’s letter, entitled True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Night, certainly inspired Shakespeare to write The Tempest, a play that satirized a failed (probably real) attempt of the shipwrecked sailors to depose the newly appointed governor. Sylvester Jourdain’s Discovery of Bermudas published in 1610 was certainly the playwright’s alternative source. But Shakespeare could have found additional inspiration, John Demaray says, in Hakluyt’s Principall navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, published

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in 1583, or in John De Mandeville’s and Montaigne’s essays. According to John Demaray, the first documented performance of The Tempest „took place in front of King James at court, almost certainly in the Masquing House, on the evening of 1 November 1611 just after All Hallows Eve when demonic spirits were believe to roam the earth.“12 Even though many cultural historians have found valid parallels between Shakespeare’s drama and the Virgilian ethos, or between The Tempest and the Renaissance Court Masque,13 the play presented an original idea of the plot, as new as the event the play was relating: twelve years after losing his Duchy, a learned magician, having miraculously escaped from a storm with his daughter, deviates the ship of his former usurper, and through magic powers never invoked before on a London stage, raises a tempest that causes a ship and its occupants–those who had stolen his Duchy and cast him adrift–to wash ashore on his island. Earlier plays, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, had already accustomed the theater‑goers to Shakespeare’s meta‑theatrical excursions into metaphorical spaces and to the language of action‑magic performed by fantastic agents. Other Shakespearean texts, such as The Winter’s Tale or Hamlet, prove that the late Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the reformation of theater engaged the fictional gaps and the lapses of time within a coherent strategy of world‑remaking; the English cycle and the following tragedies show Shakespeare’s slow roadwork towards an original political axiology, sustained by a correspondent aesthetic of performance. Yet, in spite of the many portraits of displaced kings in Shakespeare’s historical plays, no other play treated the symbolic royalty in a similar manner.

The present study was born in the belief that Shakespearean critique can still profit from an adequate reinsertion of the play in its original repository of themes, as part of a cultural era whose theatricality has integrated and converted the themes and modes specific of the Renaissance occult philosophy into the meta‑narrative

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strategies of modern encomium. In the two sections of the present study, I will take another look at Shakespeare’s The Tempest from two alternative angles: one analytical – dedicated to a review of the main historical interpretations, the other philosophical and speculative, aiming for an original interpretation of thr play. Indirectly, the latter draws upon the Heideggerian apparatus behind the contemporary critique of representation. In my interpretation, The Tempest unveils itself as an ars poetica, a statement on the condition and potential of theatrical art; Prospero, its inaugural voice, acts as a „poet who speaks being“, in other words as an originator of meaning on the emergent stage of political science. In this train of thought, I choose to define the festive climate of the play’s first representations as a select environment where the postulates of the Renaissance occult philosophy are newly „condensed“ into original theatrical and political metaphors. Along these lines, I will analyze Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a turning point in the evolution of Western political imaginarium: Prospero, enjoying a great deal of those prerogatives once given to Christ, will be shown to theatrically embody the Savior on the historical stage.

The Tempest’s innovative artistic conventions, I hold, discover a theatrical „world“ in which the (magic) agencies of the plot interact in innovative manners that propose a new „conativity“14 (vocative or imperative addressing of receiver) based upon „phatic“ (checking channel working) and „metalingual“ (checking code working) paradoxes and ensured by fantastic mediators. Certainly, Prospero uses Ariel as the magic executioner of his unspoken intentions and, when he speaks, he does so only to adjust the course of events. My analysis places Jakobson’s functions (originally descriptive) in a dialectical tension, which tries to track meaning at the crossroads of two interrogative streams: the standard questions of conativity „who says what?“ and „who calls who?“ are replaced by a more baffling search for the proper response: „who and what is conjured through what is said?“ and „how did this become possible?“ – questions that

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can find their proper answer within an applied semantic of fictional worlds15. Certainly, Shakespeare brought to surface the major philosophical questions of his play through a paradoxical, asymmetrical positioning of discursive agencies: he does so by placing the conjurer and the listener back to back, beside revolving walls and yet, in search of a face‑to‑face encounter.16 The paradox of this undertaking corresponds, on one hand to the creative standards of poe‑ tike, imaginary action that follows the new constraints of a fantastic fictional world, and, on the other hand, is made possible by the ironical setting, locating characters in distinct hierarchical compartments of the same revolving stage. I would also like to discuss Prospero’s magic in relation with the character’s alleged intuition, a faculty that, in blending the attributes of enlightened vision, cynicism, and creativity, is shown as instrumental of prudent leadership.­ My other perspective is set on The Tempest as an ars politica, a text whose originality resides in its potential to encode political principles in dynamic pictures that offer prescriptive instructions to the symbolic language of persuasion. Its metalinguistic stance consists of its phatic voice‑hierarchization: „checking channel‑working“ in this perspective signifies the new position and manner of persuasion of the agency of power in relation with its beneficiaries, which, in opening new channels of communication inside the island’s magic maze provokes an asymmetric response between hierarchical agents endowed with different potentials. In essence, space‑time works differently in the conjurer’s magic cave and in the conjured slumber of the neophytes, while the island’s maze works as a wonderland – a magically articulated space where surprises are educed in the form of initiatory trials. In my attempt to identify different roots to the economy of kingship in The Tempest, I will propose a discussion of the Shakespearean kings’ discourses rooted in the same logic of the spectacle, one that supports asymmetric communicational effects around the theatrical rendering of royal prerogatives. As Christopher Pie indicated in his 1990 study,

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The Regal Phantasm. Shakespeare and The Politics of Spectacle17, Richard II, Henry IV – I & II, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Leontes and Prospero can be understood as experimental characters, whose functions display Shakespeare’s need to append the symbolic logic of sovereignty to a superior technique of theatrical representation, centered on the monarch’s figure as an emerging hero of modern historical knowledge.

Part I: Preparing „The Tempest“ Prospero’s Planet

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1

Beyond Aristotle’s Poetics: „unities“ and their new functions in the play

A common note of classical and modern interpretations of The Tempest is that, in acknowledging the strangeness of the play, they elaborate around the intricacies of plot in relation with the innovative narrative agencies. It is the very imposition of unity in the plot that creates an effect of illusion about the subsequent coherence of dramatic space and dialogical interchange, on a stage that otherwise would not „hold“ the characters on the same plane in a credible manner. Surprisingly, The Tempest is one of the few texts in which Shakespeare respects the formal use of unities, spatial and temporal. Even so, the representational effect of unity of time and place is forged through recourse to new conventions, which cannot be identified any longer as part of the Aristotelian tradition. In effect, such clusters need to be understood as a new type of „traffic“, preeminently fantastic, between uncanny rhetorical agencies. In this direction, critical intuitions are not at all new. For example, Castelvetro’s and Sir Philip Sidney’s 1595 denouncement of the abuse of unities in Elizabethan playwrights who choose unskillfully to show „Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other,18“and opt to condense the adventures of a man’s whole life in two hours’ space;19 the Elizabethan critics demonstrated that the violation of unities was a common practice of 16th century dramatists.

Correspondingly, their zest for more spectacular representational techniques did not necessarily prove skill at mastering the new narrative wagers. In compensation, since licentious transgression of convention was excused in Elizabethan theaters, the most skilled playwrights took experimentalism to its peaks. Shakespeare himself asserted in one of his last plays, The Winter’s Tale, through Polixenes’

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voice, that, on stage, the relationship between art and nature favors the former: Yet nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean: so, over that art Which you say adds to nature –change it rather; but The art itself is nature. (IV.4. 89‑97)

Obviously, when Sir Philip Sidney acknowledged the origins of the art of verse in the Aristotelian mimesis, redefining poetry as „an art of imitation… that is to say, of representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth; to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture, with its end, to teach and delight“20, he did not speak any longer the pure Aristotelian theoretical idiom. Sidney’s following description of poetry marks a visible point of departure from the Aristotelian doctrine of imitation of natural phenomena. The poet’s skill – he held – gives a proper expression to the ideal forms in the mind of the Demiurge, that, in the works of nature are present only in a diffuse, not yet crystallized manner. Accordingly, the philosopher’s duty is to „follow nature.“ In contrast, the poet’s craft of verse bounds him to replicate creation in demiurgic images: [the poet] lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, does grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than nature brings forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature…

Sidney’s concept of imitation, modern critic Marvin Carlson infers, „is thus closer to Neoplatonist than to Aristotelian thought.“21 Sidney’s Defense of Poesy also unveiled the purpose of poetry in the call for a virtuous action in resolution of experiential learning22.

Thus, in both comedy and tragedy, we are taught the language of moral utility: in comedy our attention is drawn up to the common errors in „ridiculous and scornful sort“,23 whereas in tragedy, we

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are shown the intricacies of ethical choice „making kings fear to be tyrants“ and instructing us of a newly revealed epistemological dilemma, given in „the uncertainty of the world.“ Sidney’s original accent in dramatic representation was one of quality, given that the new purpose of comedy, as John Lily (1553‑1606) wrote in his Prefaces was „to moue inward delight, not outward lightness, and to breede (if it might be) soft smiling, not loud laughing.“24 The movement from strong effects to a finer attunement of action and voices corresponded to the discovery of the character with its psychological particularities, a tendency also visible in the visual arts of the Baroque. Such was Ben Jonson’s innovative description of characteriology in The Introduction to Every Man Out of His Humour (1600), where, in the tradition of the Renaissance occult medicine, the author examined human personality in connection to its four bodily fluids, determining the noticeable behavioral tendencies in relation with the pondering of fluids in one’s blood. Carson notes that although the general purpose of comedy in Elizabethan era remained a moral quest, the new culture finally learned how to transgress classical theory when it came to choosing the tools of creativity over formal demands: on one hand, Ben Jonson’s text outlined the classical laws of Comedy, such as equal separation into scenes and acts, adequate number of performers, presence of the choir, and coherence of spatial and temporal unities; on the other hand, he argued „that a poet need not hold too closely to these and that in fact classic authors themselves did not always do so.“25 The (newly discovered) uncertainty of the world was finally assumed as an innovative exercise in the stylistic hybridism of the major Elizabethan plays, such as the dramas of Marlowe, Kid and Shakespeare. These authors, in spite of their apparent disregard for the contemporary theory of theater, chose to blend the formerly distinct postulates of genres in amalgamated scenes, whose function was to elicit sympathy with admiration and also to steer the

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