Shakespeare's “Shrieking Harbinger”: Seasonal pattern, genre, and the shapes of time in the “First Folio” and “The Phoenix and the Turtle”

• Main Author: Stetner, Clifford Darrow
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2008
• Subjects: Aristophanes (450?-388? BC); British & Irish literature; British and Irish literature; Cultural anthropology; Euripides (484-406 BC); Folklore; Foucault, Michel; Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976); Jonson, Ben (1573-1637); Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593); Marx, Karl (1818-1883)
• ISBN: 0549805958; 9780549805953

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between the structural and generic aspects of Shakespeare's Elizabethan drama as published in the First Folio and those of his short poem The Phoenix and the Turtle published at the turn of the seventeenth century in Robert Chester's Loves Martyr. Eight of the ten Elizabethan history plays attributed to Shakespeare generally are read as a cycle of two tetralogies, the first composed tetralogy consisting of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III, the second tetralogy beginning with Richard II, running through the two parts of Henry IV and concluding with Henry V. While it frequently is noted that the two tetralogies were produced in reverse chronological order, it has not been remarked by critics of Shakespeare's work that the structure of this tetralogy cycle in its order of production conforms to what Theodor Gaster identifies as the Seasonal Pattern structuring many examples of ancient Near Eastern religious performance cycles. The plot of these archaic dramatic cycles generally consisted of the agon, death, resurrection, and marriage of the spirit of fertility, and the conformity of the myth of Shakespeare's Phoenix and the Turtle with its cardinal episodes agrees with a strikingly analogous conformity in the Seasonal Pattern ordering Shakespeare's Elizabethan drama, the recuperation of linear tragic narrative by containment within a circular tragicomic metanarrative, adopted from the magical and political function of seasonal ritual drama cycles, is repeated on multiple levels both in Shakespeare's authorial development and in the posthumous organization of the First Folio. The central thesis of this dissertation is that, after an application of narrative circularity to the tragicomic emplotment of Tudor historiography in his Elizabethan plays, Shakespeare's rewriting of the Phoenix and Turtle myth deconstructs the myth's originally recuperative function and thus prologues the period of his Jacobean tragedies. This rewriting expresses a transition from the comical to the tragical in Shakespeare’s use of dramatic genre which is symptomatic of a transition in the phenomenology of temporality from regenerative circularity towards progressive historicity in Early Modern Western culture.