Narrative Universals, Heroic Tragi-Comedy, and Shakespeare's Political Ambivalence

Heroic tragi-comedy is one of the three most common narrative prototypes cross-culturally. Particular works are generated from this prototype through development principles and motifs. The development principles and motifs recur cross-culturally as well. Moreover, the resulting works tend to serve the same social functions at different times and places—commonly, enhancing in-group identification and opposition to an out-group, especially in the context of war. On the other hand, the prototypes, development principles, and motifs are cognitive structures, not Platonic forms. Thus there is some individual variation in their details, interaction, and functional consequences. The present essay examines five of Shakespeare's plays—Henry V, Julius Caesar, Richard II, Hamlet, and The Tempest. The goal of this examination is to isolate the central features of Shakespeare's distinctive use of the heroic structure, his favored development principles and motifs, and, most importantly, the recurring functional implications of his plays. The result tells us something about the body of Shakespeare's work and about the precise way a human mind operates in the creation of literature. It also has interpretive consequences, for it puts the individual plays in a new context and thus reveals new aspects of their narrative organization and thematic concerns.