Abstract
Shakespeare’s drive towards knowledge, and the dramatic realization of knowledge, led him constantly to invoke, monitor, and test to the limits of human comprehension the relationship between figure and ground, between “man” and “elements.” His problematizing of the natural attitude towards the elemental is perhaps most apparent in the great tragedies — especially in King Lear, where the radical instability of “nature” and its cognates is continuously in evidence — but the interrogation of the elements is at least as marked and important in the history plays, where prose and poetry mediate between process and purpose, successiveness and succession, between the apparently arbitrary successiveness of events and the resolution of the question of succession to the throne of England into the more or less consoling configurations of dynasty and national destiny.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See, e.g., the conclusion to David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982)
the central argument of Frederick Turner, Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
For this tradition of interpretation see, e.g., Philip Edwards, “The Late Comedies,” Shakespeare: Select Bibliographical Guides ed. Stanley Wells (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 120 ff.
The Tempest, The Riverside Shakespeare ed. G. B. Evans et al (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). All further quotations from Shakespeare follow this edition and are identified parenthetically in the text of this essay.
The semantic possibilities available to Shakespeare are well documented in OED via John Florio’s A World of Wordes, or Most Copious and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English (1598): “Aere (aire, aira) the aire. Also an aspect, countenance, cheere, a look or appearance in the face of man or woman. Also, a tune or aire of a song or ditty.”
“Apology for Raymond Sebond,” as quoted by Ricardo Quinones in The Renaissance Discovery of Time, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature no. 31 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 209.
Ibid, p. 210.
Cf. Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), opening pages.
In his edition of Cymbeline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, p. 220), J. C. Maxwell inclines to the view that the derivation of mulier from mollis “is still probable.” However, this etymology is rated dubious in the new Oxford Latin Dictionary ed. P. W. Glare, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1976). For conventions and problems see Frank L. Borchardt, “Etymology in Tradition and in the Northern Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (1968), pp. 415–29.
Michael J. B. Allen, Marsilio Ficino and the Phaedran Charioteer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 82–3.
Niccolo Macchiavelli, The Prince trans, and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 72.
For a fine account of a very complicated situation, see Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1979).
Cf. an essay I read after writing my own, Jonathan Goldberg, “Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power,” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 119 ff.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1988 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Findlay, L.M. (1988). Temporality Puts on Airs: Process, Purpose, and Poetry in Shakespeare’s Histories. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: Part 2 The Airy Elements in Poetic Imagination. Analecta Husserliana, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2841-1_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2841-1_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-011-7662-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-2841-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive