Queenly Shadows: On Mediation in Two Comedies

Summary

And anyway, is it really possible that in logic I should have to deal with forms that I can invent? What I have to deal with must be that which makes it possible for me to invent them.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5-555)

It has long been held that Shakespeare reflects abiding human truths, the greatness and endurance of his plays flowing from their knowledge about life and from the poetic grandeur expressing this. I would not deny our author's 'universality', but I hope to redefine it, examining less 'what he has to say' than a coherence of materials and theme, historical context and cognitive form which makes communication with audiences possible at all.

To suggest this, however modestly in such an essay, I use methods pioneered by Claude Levi- Strauss which, in turn, reinforce insights of Marx. The discussion is, without question, preliminary (even of the dramas selected); yet it may be considered self-sufficient, and is intended as provocative of later research whose final achievements may require computers and Boolean algebra. Using orthodox general interpretations of The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream, I do not struggle to impose new fundamental readings. Instead, I hope to identify something of how and why particular dramatic rhythms engaged Shakespeare's imagination, and therefore something of how and why they continue to attract us who bear a like (although inferior) sensibility - one compounded of socially-educated responses and yet, perhaps, also of cognitively innate predispositions.