Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I
- 1 “As it was acted to great applause”: Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences and the physicality of response
- 2 Meat, magic, and metamorphosis: on puns and wordplay
- 3 Managing the aside
- 4 Exposition, redundancy, action
- 5 Disorder and convention
- PART II
- Plays and editions cited
- Works cited
- Index
5 - Disorder and convention
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I
- 1 “As it was acted to great applause”: Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences and the physicality of response
- 2 Meat, magic, and metamorphosis: on puns and wordplay
- 3 Managing the aside
- 4 Exposition, redundancy, action
- 5 Disorder and convention
- PART II
- Plays and editions cited
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
I suggest that conventions occur first as anticonventions or antisigns … that is, to the extent that something is a convention it is also a sign, meaning that it has taken its place as one of the efficient and invisible chips in the informational circuitry. But how did it get there in the first place if not as an attempt to break into the circuit, to pester the circuit with nuance, to wound it with the resistance of its presence? In other words, it began as an image in which the known world was, in some sense, being recreated or revised out of its primal linguistic matter. In some such way all images, to one degree or other, erupt delightfully and claim their presence as a site of disclosure, putting us “somewhere else than we usually tend to be.” Without this character as site, there is no delight, only the passage of information.
To this point I have dealt primarily with potentially inefficient or intrusive verbal phenomena. My explicit assumption has been from the beginning that the potential clumsiness of these phenomena is a vital and valuable part of their effect. The repetition of extra-dramatic or partially extra-dramatic verbal moments, moments where the artifice of the language is greater or almost greater than context can bear, creates a powerful conventional system wherein audiences are given a sense of knowingness and perception that supersedes – even outrightly disguises – excess, incoherence, and discontinuity.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002