SYNTHETIC VISION: A STUDY OF ELIZABETHAN JUSTICE AND THE STRUCTURE OF RENAISSANCE GENRE

Georg Lukacs in The Theory of the Novel attempted to determine the extent to which historico-philosophical viewpoint shapes literary genre. Lukacs' aim was to discover what it is about the modern world that leads to a reformulation of epic into the novel. His position, ultimately, is that the novel is a fragmented form, and that its structural problems are "the mirror-image of a world gone out of joint". Lukacs himself soon came to regard The Theory of the Novel as a failure. But surely it is a magnificent failure, a seminal work which establishes the historico-philosophic world view surrounding a work as a precondition for at least the nature of any given genre.;But there is a third element: consider the influence of subject-matter on generic structure. Friendship as subject may predispose generic structure to alternating images of union and separation; universal harmony may give rise to images of ritual communal dancing, may shape metrical structure as a mirror or universal harmony; meaningless universe as subject may involve structure and imagery as paradox or structure of form transformed to--amorphous, formlessness as formal mirror of the subject. Here subject-matter rather than world view is the shaping principle.;No formal structure is totally free of the influence of both world view and subject-matter, and world view and subject-matter must be influenced likewise by genre. By the very act of creation through the novel, one is hardpressed to posit a world view that is other than ironic. Genre likewise shapes subject-matter. That is, subject-matter is delimited by the nature of the form which contains it. If lyric is to remain lyric, it must project its subject-matter not as conceptual abstraction but as concrete image; it must contain that image as stasis and avoid animation of the image, for such is the action of they mythopoeic lyric which becomes epic.;But at what point does the mythopoeic lyric become epical? And what taxonomy can adequately contain Song of Myself, the lyric epic? The fact is we don't have answers to these questions because generic categories are not absolute as I have implied, nor is our critical vocabulary so precise as we ordinarily suppose. What is required is judiciousness, the recognition that any work may transcend generic theories without discrediting the general validity of those theories.;The interrelationship of world view and generic structure may be regarded from both ends: one may consider the structure of genre with a view toward understanding the historico-philosophic milieu, or vice versa. My direction is essentially that of the latter, though the former procedure will also occasionally be followed. But specifically: It is my contention that we will only fully understand the literature of the last decades of Elizabeth's reign if we recognize the nature of the historico-philosophic world view which nurtured that literature and in part determined the structure of Renaissance genre.;My contentions are essentially general theories whose validity is established by the abundance of evidence which led to their formulation: viz., the works of the last decades of the Elizabethan age reflect the world view of a given subject. The subject with which this study is concerned is justice. Most specifically, then, it is my contention that the historico-philosophic conception of justice at this time is mirrored in the imagery, agency, themes, and structures of the primary forms, epic, drama, lyric, centrally concerned with justice.