Time and Causality in Renaissance Revenge Tragedy
- Time and Causality in Renaissance Revenge Tragedy
Associate Professor of English, Oregon State University
Notes
1. Benjamin Lee Whorf, ‘An American Model of the Universe,’ in Language, Thought, and Reality (Cambridge: Technology-MIT 1956), 57–8.
2. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon 1972), 12.
3. Jan Mukarovsky, ‘Time in Film,’ in Structure, Sign, and Function, trans and ed John Burbank and Peter Steiner (New Haven: Yale University Press 1978), 191–200.
4. See Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England, Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 (Durham: Duke University Press 1979); Herschel Baker, The Race of Time: Three Lectures on Renaissance Historiography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1967); Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York: St Martin's 1969).
5. Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1972), esp 291–412. See also Burke, 48–9; Erwin Panofsky, ‘Father Time,’ Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row 1962), 69–93.
6. Walter Ong, SJ, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1958). See Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983); Jesse M. Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornall University Press 1985).
7. For the corresponding fragmentation of the ‘object’ of the sonnet, described as the ‘scattering’ of the representation of the sonnet's woman, see Nancy Vickers, ‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,’ Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 265–79; ‘“The blazon of sweet beauty's best”: Shakespeare's Lucrece,’ in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen 1985), 95–115; ‘The Body Remembered: Petrarchan Lyric and the Strategies of Description,’ in Mimesis, from Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England 1982), 100–9.
8. Quinones, 361.
9. For the absolute separation of categories of knowledge and its effect on ‘content,’ see Ong's section on ‘Solon's law,’ 280–1.
10. See Quinones, 166.
11. Aristotle, Poetics, VII.3 (1q450b), 31.
12. For qualifications of the plot's role, see Maynard Mack, ‘The Jacobean Shakespeare: Some Observations on the Construction of the Tragedies,’ Othello, ed Alvin Kernan (New York: Signet 1963), 208–44; for a discussion of the multiple (and therefore not strictly linear) plot, see Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1971).
13. See Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Harvard-Belknap 1963); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1962); Pëtr Bogatyrëv and Roman Jakobson, ‘Folklore as a Special Form of Creativity,’ trans Manfred Jacobson, The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929–1946, ed Peter Steiner (Austin: University of Texas Press 1982), 34–46.
14. Even the neoclassical Jonson warned against ‘servile imitation’ in Timber, or Discoveries. See Ben Jonson, Ben Jonson, ed C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon 1925–52), VIII, 638–9.
15. See Quinones, 300.
16. Thomas Kyd, The Works of Thomas Kyd, ed Frederick S. Boas, rev ed (Oxford: Clarendon 1955).
17. The idea of substitution suggested in line 129, for instance, becomes central to both Othello and The Revenger's Tragedy.
18. Aristotle, Poetics, xv.7 (1454a–b), 55. Sequential works such as The Oresteia or Shakespeare's histories present a stage in this process of modularization and limitation, breaking ‘causality’ into definite units that are then subdivided into a limited number of individual plays. Chronical histories had also divided time into defined units (years, the reigns of kings), but not on the basis of the consistent size of the analytical unit, i.e., the unit of perceived causal closure (the plot itself).
19. T.S. Eliot, Introduction, in Seneca: His Tenne Tragedies Translated into English, ed Thomas Newton (1927; Bloomington: Indiana...
