Introduction shakespeare and the Law of Genre

Genre Knowledge

Jacques Derrida, suggests that the law of genre is a taboo on miscegenation, but that the condition of this taboo is the counter-law of the impossibility of not mixing genres (and genders).49 Derrida exposes the ideological horizon whereby the law of genre is conflated with the law of Nature. He illuminates the guiding assumption of all genre theory, from the past to the present, which upholds that generic combinations and mixtures are not acceptable, and that the law of genre must be preserved at all costs.

The notion that ‘kinds’ are somehow naturally simple is underscored by the belief that the natural is thus the principle by which the world is a self-generating succession of sameness, and not the propagator of the ‘hodge-podge’ of hybridity referred to by Renaissance playwrights such as John Lyly.

This restrictive classical requirement is revealed as a partially totalitarian dictum, which is utterly violated by the ‘irresponsibility’ of artistic representation. Take for example the plethora of generic categories that were available in the period of intense literary experimentation that we refer to as the early modern period. Here, writers appear to specialise in hybrid forms and generic mixtures: the emblem book (of icons and adages), the florilegium (collections of different types of verse), the book of essays (Montaigne’s The Essayes is the most famous example), or the anatomy (where a subject of intense topicality is dissected). The law of genre, or more precisely the law of nature, was presumably threatened by this large diversity of literary ‘kinds’ thus posing a threat to the idea of generic classification. The fluidity and multivalence of genre was possibly perceived as a threat to the whole notion that there must be an order of ‘kindness’ to things. Strict taxonomic regulations were seemingly applied to almost every area of early modern existence with the taboo on miscegenation policing both private and public realms. It is perhaps possible to say then, that rather than finding genre mixing inadmissable, certain authorities were terrified by the possible results of generic hybridity, which they perceived as going against nature with the consequent horrific inevitability of the production of either monstrous or ridiculous creations.