Abstract
This essay offers a structural analysis of space in Shakespeare’s plays. Taking his cue from Yuri Lotman’s topological approach to plot organization, Andreas Mahler argues that Shakespeare achieves dramatic momentum by adding a third space to Lotman’s concept of two spaces divided by a boundary transgressed at the outset. Both the comedy As You Like It and the tragedy King Lear start with a vertical organization of social space. Characters belonging to the ‘upper’ level are thrust into the ‘lower’ level, their eventual return being effected by a passage through an ‘enclave’, a third space where characters can be temporarily ‘taken out of the game’ (Mahler) in preparation for their social (comic or tragic) restitution—a dynamic that is significantly eroded in Hamlet.
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Notes
- 1.
In what follows, I largely draw on what I have tried to develop in greater detail in ‘Welt Modell Theater’ (Mahler 1998).
- 2.
In one of the most widespread illustrations of the medieval/early modern idea of a hierarchical world order following the principle of ‘degree’, in Carolus Bovillus’ Liber de Sapiente (1509), the rationality of Man/Woman is significantly opposed to the sensitivity of the animal kingdom as represented by the horse. Incidentally, this is still referred to by Jonathan Swift, in his polemic reversal of that order in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, when he places the Houyhnhnms above Gulliver, thus sceptically seeing Man/Woman not so much as ‘animal rationale’ but, at best, as ‘rationis capax’.
- 3.
For the idea of a plot system, or Lotman’s sjužet, as following a language of ‘spatial relations’, organizing the ‘world-within-the-play’ along some basic topological axis that creates two semantic fields with an impenetrable border, which, in the case of an ‘event’, is nevertheless transgressed (by the ‘hero-agent’), see The Structure of the Artistic Text (Lotman 1977). For the (vertical) idea of the chain of being, see The Great Chain of Being (<Author-Query><!----></Author-Query>Lovejoy 1964) as well as still, despite everything, with reference to ‘order’ and ‘degree’, The Elizabethan World Picture (Tillyard 1978).
- 4.
This is the basic feudal idea of a ‘brotherhood’ of love or mutual respect, led by a primus inter pares responsible for the common good, see ‘Restitution’ (Mahler 2005, 182–4).
- 5.
- 6.
According to Lotman, an ‘event in a text is the shifting of a persona across the border of a semantic field’ (Lotman 1977, 233; original emphasis); the word ‘loving’ already indicates where the ‘correct’ brotherhood is situated.
- 7.
For a description of ‘culture’ as a semiosphere which, in semanticizing contingencies, is apt to hold the promise of a meaningful orientation in life, see Universe of the Mind (Lotman 1990); for the conception of ‘carnival’ as a ‘golden’ or ‘green’ world, as some kind of utopian ‘time-out’ or ‘wilderness’ where time can be ‘fleeted carelessly’ up until the moment when the seriousness of humdrum everyday life sets in again, with reference to a ‘saturnalian’ pattern leading ‘from release to clarification’, see Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Barber 1972), as well as, from a historical perspective, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Burke 1988), and, with reference to an early modern calendar of festivity, Shakespeare’s Festive World (Laroque 1993).
- 8.
- 9.
For a defence of drama as a dialogic genre, against Bakhtin’s own view that only the novel is apt to introduce a dialogic language use, see ‘Comic Subversion’ (Pfister 1987).
- 10.
For the ‘classificatory character’ of the plotless text and its insistence on ‘order’ as opposed to the plot text as its ‘negation’, see Structure (Lotman 1977); for the idea that the cyclical text-generating mechanism fixes ‘the principle’ or ‘laws’ whereas the linear one describes ‘anomalies’ or ‘the chance occurrence’, see ‘Origin’ (Lotman 1979, 163) and also Universe (Lotman 1990, 153).
- 11.
For the original development of this, see ‘Welt’ (Mahler 1998, 16).
- 12.
- 13.
This is what I have tried to develop in ‘Komödie, Karneval, Gedächtnis’ (Mahler 1993, 94–103), where I argued that the early modern period seems to witness a medial shift of the enclave from the (orally determined) ‘carnivalesque’ to a (predominantly written) ‘aesthetic’; for the latter see also ‘Performing Arts’ (Mahler 2010).
- 14.
For the carnivalesque double time scheme of ‘two lives’, one ‘official’ and exclusive, and the other ‘the life of the carnival square’ and inclusive, see Problems (Bakhtin 1984, 129; all original emphases).
- 15.
So what we have here is not so much an opposition of terms (‘a’ vs ‘b’) but, rather, one of relations (‘opposition’ vs. ‘equivalence’).
- 16.
Of course, this superimposition of divergent theories is highly reductive and would deserve a much more differentiated attention and discussion, which I cannot undertake here.
- 17.
For the idea of a ‘positivization of negativity’ as a promise of opening up access to the inaccessible, see, with a view on the phenomenon of laughter, ‘Über das Lachen’ (Ritter 1989); for its use for a functional description of comedy in particular, see ‘Elemente’ (Warning 1976, 325–9), as well as The Ambivalences of Medieval Religious Drama (Warning 2001) for its broader use for a description of the function of ‘art’ in general as a site of exposing equivalence.
- 18.
For the early modern shift from ‘partibility’ as an equal share of the inheritance in question, to ‘testation’ as the (exclusive) preference of the eldest born, with reference to King Lear, see Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Wilson 1993, 223–9).
- 19.
For the idea of a benign nature setting things right as opposed to a malignant nature ruthlessly pursuing individual desires, see Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (Danby 1982, 20–53).
- 20.
In this, one can see again the structure of neutralization, the idea of ‘and/and’ or ‘neither/nor’: in the wilderness, Edgar is himself and not himself or he is neither ‘Edgar’ nor ‘not Edgar’.
- 21.
For tragedy as a syntagmatic genre as opposed to comedy as merely using the syntagmatic deployment of a plot in order to (primarily) expose ‘funny’ paradigms, see ‘Elemente’ (Warning 1976, 289–90); as a consequence, comic restitution seems to be predominantly bent on harmony and integration whereas tragic restitution, in its syntagmatic interest, is mainly geared towards elimination and death, see ‘Welt’ (Mahler 1998, 17–32).
- 22.
For the highly suggestive development of the concept of a ‘hodology’ apt to describe characters’ trajectories as dynamic moves through (topologically determined) fictive worlds, see ‘Shakespeare’s Topology of Shipwrecking’ (Habermann 2012, 58–9).
- 23.
In Tate’s adaptation, The History of King Lear (1681), staged alternatively, and exclusively, right into the middle of the nineteenth century, Cordelia and Lear are liberated from prison by Edgar and Albany, and rightfully re-instituted in their old positions: ‘My dear Cordelia!’, says Edgar. ‘Lucky was the minute/ Of our approach. The gods have weighed our sufferings;/ W’are past the fire, and now must shine to ages’ (Tate 1976, V.6.39–41), and Albany happily confirms: ‘The wheel of Fortune now has made her circle’ (V.6.61).
- 24.
This seems to be precisely the point when the cyclical finds itself superseded by the linear or, in Lotman’s terms, where the ‘principle’ gives way to the ‘chance occurrence’ (Lotman 1979, 163).
- 25.
This problem of preventive action is precisely the same dilemma that Shakespeare has already treated in his Julius Caesar, see ‘Restitution’ (Mahler 2005, 184–90).
- 26.
For the mask as a kind of carnivalesque identity in Hamlet, as a fictive pretence, see ‘Maske und Erkenntnis’ (Mahler 1995, 128–31).
- 27.
This means that if Lear dies as King, Hamlet never actually becomes one, and Claudius’ successor has to be brought in from outside; in other words, the ‘chance occurrence’ denies the ‘principle’.
- 28.
One could also think of early modern plot making in other European cultures; for a fruitful analysis of the A-B-C-A-trajectory in Cervantes’ Novelas ejemplares, see Die Öffnung der Welt (Dürr 2010).
- 29.
This is the point when the linear structure takes over; see ‘Welt’ for a description of ‘modern’ linear plot making without an enclave, as can be seen starting with Ben Jonson (Mahler 1998, 29–42).
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Mahler, A. (2016). Shakespeare’s Enclaves. In: Habermann, I., Witen, M. (eds) Shakespeare and Space. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51835-4_2
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