UNI-VERSE

1
UNI-VERSE

• A brief discussion of genre
• Comedy
• Tragedy
• Romance

2
FUZZY CATEGORIES

• The best actors in the world, either for tragedy,
  comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
  historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
  tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene
  individable, or poem unlimited.
• (Hamlet, 2.2.391-4)

3
TRAGEDY Division and Displacement

• Conflict between
• Honour and Duty
• Surface and Substance
• Social world and individual desire
• Nature and nature
• Providence and will

4
TIME IS OUT OF JOINT
5
COMEDY DELIGHT

• for delight we scarcely do, but in things that
  have a conveniency to ourselves, or to the
  general nature laughter almost ever comes of
  things most disproportioned to ourselves and
  nature. Delight hath a joy in it, either
  permanent or present.
• (Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry)

6
COMEDY Decorum Celestial Spheres
7
COMEDY RECONCILIATION
8
ROMANCE

• Er no.

9
ROMANCE Heightened Reality

• Magical forces
• Moral allegory
• Court intrigue
• Mistaken identity
• Interimplication of the mundane and the mystical
• Mutual influence
• Resolution of mundane problems by supernatural
  means

10
Tragedy, Comedy, Romance and Reading

• HERMENEUTICS a mode of inquiry based on a
  metaphor of DIS-COVERY or exposure of an interior
  truth.
• Assumes that
• A truth exists
• a stable reality
• mis-reading can be corrected by proper
  application of skill OR inspiration

11
Tragedy, Comedy Hermeneutics

• TRAGEDY
• Faulty or indeterminate hermeneutics
• Opacity or confusion of signs
• POLYSEMY

• COMEDY
• Functional hermeneutics
• Transparency of signs
• Unified meaning

12
Romance/Tragi-comedy

• Corrective hermeneutics
• Magic/supernatural perspective corrects human
  error
• Allegorical model harmonizes nature and Nature