Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 9

SHAKESPEARE, CERVANTES, AND THE ROMANCE OF THE REAL

can at least sketch their singular achievements in engaging both
reality and romantic enchantment simultaneously.
Just past the midpoint of his landmark study, Mimesis (1946),
Erich Auerbach offers consecutive chapters on Shakespearean
drama and Cervantes's Don Quixote. The authors occupy a key
place in Auerbach's argument that the growth of the West's unique
literary realism is principally a matter of rejecting the hierarchy
of stylistic and generic classifications characteristic of ancient
classical poetry, which were, for a time, resuscitated by humanist
critics and writers of the Renaissance, whose neoclassicism persisted into the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.2 The
aristocratic genres of epic and tragedy, according to this scheme,
would deal with momentous events and heroic characters in a
consistently lofty style. Commonplace occurrences and ordinary
men and women would be confined to comedy, pastoral, and
other lesser genres that eschew elevated diction and figures.
Shakespeare notoriously breaks all the "rules." He mingles
clowns and kings in the same play, and his style ranges from sublime blank verse to coarse, often bawdy prose within the same
scene. Hamlet speaks grandly to the splendid, though ominous,
ghost of his father, but banters crudely with the gravedigger. "To
be or not to be" is followed within a few moments of stage time
by "Get thee to a nunnery." As he slides in and out of madness,
the aged Lear can speak eloquent defiance to the divine powers that govern the world and subsequently mock Gloucester's
blindness with cruel humor. One might argue that this tragedy's
most heroic figure is the nameless servant who dies while trying
to defend the helpless Gloucester and gives Cornwall a mortal
wound-a bit of characterization quite out of keeping with the
neoclassical norm-as is the prominent role of Lear's fool.
moder nagejour nal .com

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Modern Age - Spring 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Spring 2016

Contents
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