Sammendrag
This dissertation in its very title purports to be an exploration of three aspects of Shakespearean romance: representation, character, and pastoral. My governing thesis is that Shakespearean romance is a startlingly complex dramatic genre in which the rich conceptual signification derives from the manner in which the plays¿ narratives are represented, from the manner in which interpretive ambiguities undercut a straightforward, emblematic reading of the plays¿ characters, and, most importantly, from the manner in which the conscious internal and external deployment of the pastoral topos proves subversive to the current prevailing view of the plays¿ green worlds of healing and regeneration. These three overriding critical concerns are what guide the development of my argument, and through specific textual and critical engagement it is my overarching goal to establish new loci of critical interest and demonstrate hitherto overlooked or unarticulated complexities or ambiguities that may offer contributions towards our recognition of not only each individual romance¿s significance, but also of the aesthetic worth of the romances as genre. In the course of this argument, I will seek to unravel how the characters of Shakespearean romance relate themselves and their narrative; not merely in the sense of the obvious stage-managers imposing their own moral vision externally ¿ Gower, Belarius, Paulina, Prospero ¿ but also in how these glosses are consistently undercut by the conflicting, independent projections of other characters ¿ Pericles, Posthumus, Florizel, Caliban ¿ a discrepancy of vision which not only complicates any clear-cut understanding of the play¿s ¿meaning,¿ but which may well constitute that ¿meaning.¿ Expanding upon the idea that Shakespearean romance is a sequential and processional form, I will focus on how the plays¿ successive intra-dramatic staging or showing-forth (dramatizations) of a symbolic (ideal) truth, leads to a state of tension between the actual and the ideal, the animate and the inanimate. Further, I will argue that while there is little conventional characterization in the romances (as dramatic mimesis recedes, character and action both become increasingly emblematic, allegorical), subtle dramatic ironies consistently undercut a straightforward reading of these characters, creating an interpretative ambiguity ¿ on the level of the individual ¿ which is at the very heart of the romance plot¿s formation of meaning. Affirming the aesthetic value of psychomachia, I will offer a reading of how the conventions of romance ¿ where, for instance, the love between hero and heroine is never subject to doubt ¿ are time and again subverted by the iridescence of character. Finally, while acknowledging the vitality, the sheer lyricism of the plays¿ natural visions, we should recognize their highly complex ¿ even startlingly sophisticated ¿ and deliberately ambiguous structure of signification which radically complicates any received understanding of the romances¿ green worlds. In grappling with the pastoral both as means and as aesthetic end, I will first attempt a reading of the romances¿ fundamental chronotopic arrangement, before exploring what the idyllic pastoral topos ¿ a re-conception of a classical paradigm ¿ comes to signify in a post-lapsarian world of politics and intrigue, and how it is consciously deployed both externally (by the playwright) and internally (by the characters).
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