Shakespeare’s reflective genre. On reflection involved in the staging of culture

Abstract

The opposition of two terms, tradition vs reflection, is laid at the foundation of the construct which is often accepted now as a representation of world culture in the process of its staging. ‘Tradition’ stands for the collective mind and the ritual/norm, while ‘reflection’ covers the growth of the individual talent liberating itself from the normative authority of generic and other prescriptions. The borderline — beyond which the power of genre with its rules, rigidly established in the classical poetics, visibly loses its prescriptive power and individual talent takes over — is usually located somewhere between the late Renaissance and the early romantic era. Among the generic forms thatrepresent a new reflective genre, S. Averintsev reckons the novel by Cervantes, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Montaigne’s essays, Pascal’s intellectual prose... In the present article, the renaissance sonnet is added to this list due to the role it played in ‘the origin of the modern mind’ (P. Oppenheimer) and its three hundred years of domination in European lyric poetry. The sonnet, with special attention given to Shakespeare’s sequence, is analyzed after a model elaborated by M. Bakhtin for the novel and by Y. Tynyanov for the Russian ode.