I read, I wrote, I printed. Yes, it is done. No, it's not great. Yes, that's fine. Next stop: Scotland! ....now, to tidy, pack, finish writing my zmas cards.... oh, and take two copies of my 22-page essay to the Examination Schools to Officially Hand It In.
Here's a teaser.
Growth characterizes the fact of scenes in Shakespeare’s romances: while the microcosm of a play is usually taken to be its characters, scenes are the bigger building blocks, fit together to create a unified play-thing grown from its scenes. Among his last plays, the quartet of romances—Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest—demonstrate a self-reflexive interest in the formal reality of play-wrighting: to construct a play, the manipulation of its structural elements is key in creating the character expressed by the genres that define it and which are, to use Rosalie Colie’s definition, “the craftsman’s tool.” While a play’s characters speak its text, they alone do not give the play its “character”—by which I mean its unique combination of plot, tone, and genre—because, as Emrys Jones observes, “plays are made of scenes before they are made of words.” This play-character, the “playness” of the play, is built first on a broader foundation: upon its scenes. Taken individually, the scenes are units of action, which, when layered together, build the whole of the play. Shakespeare constructs his romances from a collision of scenes, and it is the spark that marks their point of impact that carries the character of these plays. It is not only characters that characterize a play, but the interplay of scenes that gives a play its defining essence. Scenes accrue in the diegesis of the play through the use of genre as a tool in the crafting of meaning and overall impression—what I term the character of the play—which, in the romances, is built from the structural units of scenes and the fixative influence of genre.
Do you doubt my doubt in the Academe?
2 comments:
PUFFAMUS
If you shall chance, Cléa, to visit Academia, on
the like occasion whereon my brilliance is now on
wing, you shall see, as I have said, great
difference betwixt our Academia and your I-media.
CLÉA
I think, this coming summer, the ring of I-media
shall play Academia in the manner which it justly deserves.
PUFFAMUS
Wherein your entertainment shall shame us and we will be
justified in our snobbery; for indeed--
CLÉA
Beseech you,--
PUFFAMUS
Verily, I speak it in the presumption of my knowledge:
we cannot with such haughtiness--in so rare--I know
not what to say. We will give you sleepy lectures,
that your senses, unintelligent of our insufficience,
may, though they cannot praise us, as little accuse
us.
CLÉA
You view a great deal too severe that which I give freely.
PUFFAMUS
Believe me, I speak as my learning instructs me
and as mine egoism puts it to utterance.
CLÉA
I-media cannot show itself over-kind to Academia .
They were CBC’d together in Ideas; and
there rooted betwixt them then such an affection,
which cannot choose but branch now. Since their
more assumed dignities and practical necessities made
separation of their society, their encounters,
though not delicate, have been sometimes helped
with interchange of books, letters, lasting
interviews; that they have seemed to be together,
though absent, shook hands, as over a vast, and
embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed
winds. My piracy continue their association!
I adore this. I adore you.
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