Introduction shakespeare and the Law of Genre

1. Shakespeare and the Law of Genre

‘Genre’ as a descriptive term of classification and demarcation can be understood in various ways: as a means for writers to streamline production, as a way for critics to impose some semblance of order on the ceaseless profusion of cultural texts, and as a source of pleasure or identification for audiences and consumers. But how and by whom are genres defined? And what role does gender play in those definitions? Throughout this chapter gender is used as a central category of analysis as introducing the gender differentiation between comedy and tragedy raises some important questions about contrasting male and female principles. The male principle is often associated with the origins of tragedy22 in its preoccupation with the individual in conflict with the world whereas the female principle is often associated with the comic acceptance of that world. As this thesis unfolds it will be argued that, characteristically, Shakespeare associates the drive to impose both political and personal order on society with the ability, or rather the inability, to accept the sameness in difference.

Traditional classifications of drama normally begins with the basic distinction

between tragedy and comedy, a separation common in Greek and Roman drama, and clearly established by Shakespeare’s time. By common traditions then, tragedies were serious, involving some ultimate questions about the moral framework of human existence in the face of a common fate, death. Tragedies were by this definition serious and formal, ‘high’ art, if you will. There was no such formal agreement about comedy, and upon the early modern stage there was fierce competition between rival companies seeking to win audiences over with different ‘brands’ of comedy.

This inventiveness and structural flexibility when matched with the popularity of early modern comedy underscores an undeniable aesthetic beauty and cultural value in a period when this protean form was recognised as being resistant to definition, as somehow exceeding the binary opposition of a gendered system of genre.

Derrida’s fascinating post-modern appraisal of the regulation of genre bearing a striking resemblance to the regulation of gender re-opens the debate which has raged for centuries as to whether or not comedy is an aesthetically inferior form in need of continual correction. As David Daniell notes “the history of literary criticism is also the history of attempts to make an honest creature, as it were, of comedy”23 a point which will be reiterated throughout this chapter as the sources for this ‘dishonesty’ are sought. Standing accused of corruption and promiscuity, a defence is mounted in favour of comedy, which will require close scrutiny of the system of prohibition that is genre and the ways in which comedy seeks to inhabit and destabilise that system.

Derrida cites Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Literary Absolute on the relationship between genre (Gattung) and gender, through the many resonances of the terms “gattieren (to mix, to classify), gatten (to couple), and Gatte/Gattin (husband/ wife)”.24 This may provide a connection to Wittgenstein’s theory of generic resemblance as a form of family resemblance where a sequence of influence, imitation and inherited codes connect individual works together, marrying characteristics or conventions in order to produce specific effects.

Primitive though this Wittgensteinian theory of family grouping within genre is, it suggests that there is a need to leave room for polygenesis, for the unobvious, underlying connections between the features (and the works) of any one isolated genre.

In the phenomenon of remote influences Derrida’s view of the hymen as the symbol of the madness of essentialising sexual difference bears some relation to the ideology of genre as a form of classification freighted with a political imperative: The genre has always in all genres been able to play the role of order’s principle: resemblance, analogy, identity and difference, taxonomic classification, organisation and genealogical tree, order of reason, order of reasons, sense of sense, truth of truth, natural light and sense of history.There is a temptation in genre theory to define the opposition between comedy and tragedy as somehow interminably separate and antithetical.

This predilection towards defining literary form against what it is not establishes a juxtaposition between ‘official’ and ‘non-official’ modes of communication which expresses form in association with a sort of genre hierarchy. Definitions of tragedy may be more made, especially since Aristotle began by making them from within the theoretical confines of a generic binary which, in itself, reveals the deeply ingrained social symbolism of genre as a chronotypical system of evaluation.

Properly used, genre theory must always in one way or another project a model of the coexistence or tension between several generic modes or strands: and with this methodological axiom the typologising abuses of ‘traditional’ genre criticism can be definitely laid to rest. In The Law of Genre, Derrida opens with the literary mantra: “Genres are not to be mixed./ I will not mix genres./ I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them”.

But he then embarks on an exploration of how the taxonomy of genre is at the heart of the Law itself a law of impurity, according to a principle of contamination.

For the remainder of this chapter I will argue that it is this possibility of crosscontamination that prevents the eternal recurrence of the same and permits invention and difference. The issue of difference also highlights the fact that some genres are ‘looser’ or more open-ended in their conventions or more permeable in their boundaries than others. This permeability is of intense concern to more rigid aesthetic theories as it quickly undermines typology, as the movement of comedy throughout time demonstrates. The dramatic comedy that grew out of the boisterous choruses and dialogue of the fertility rites of the feasts of the Greek god Dionysus could not have contrasted more dramatically with the dignity and seriousness of tragedy with its homogenising and spiritually redemptive symbolism. Representative of the central and ancient principles of sexual and social inversion, comedy swiftly positioned the early modern public stage as a locale wherein the collective consciousness of its audience could wrestle with notions of power and propriety. The dramatic comedy of the Renaissance was capable of staging dramatic comedies that mimicked rituals of purification and purgation in a historical period that was experiencing a seismic shift in cultural values.

Historically, literature has been classified according to a law of genre which has sought to impose a sense of order upon a literary history of invention, hybridity, and disorder. But the question of how this ‘disorder’ both mutates and oxygenates rder in literary discourse is simultaneously the story of how the genre of comedy evolved from a ‘goat-song’ to an aesthetic form.