Book contents
4 - Hamlet as mourning-play
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2010
Summary
Allegory has to do, precisely in its destructive furor, with dispelling the illusion that proceeds from all ‘given order’, whether of art or of life: the illusion of totality or of organic wholeness which transfigures that order and makes it seem endurable. And this is the progressive tendency of allegory.
Walter BenjaminTHE AESTHETICS OF THE TRAUERSPIEL
The aesthetic space of Timon of Athens – depicting an emptied world ruled over by commodification and devoid of other values – is in many ways sui generis. While the play fascinates us with its prescient conceptualization and instantiation of an idea of the aesthetic, it displays other important qualities besides meta-aesthetic ones: impure aesthetics such as I am advocating is not exhausted in recognizing meta-aesthetic moments. It is a means as well of exploring works of art displaying other complex dynamics, notably including the four motifs I highlighted in the Introduction: aesthetic forms expressive of their originating historical eras but projecting non-existing utopian possibilities; subtexts of repressed human desires and concerns; art as human labor at work on given forms, traditions, and contents; and art as a means of representing humanity's relation to the natural world. All of these qualities were apparent in the analyses of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Timon of Athens, but they were necessarily subordinated to a probing of those works for implied aesthetic ideas.
In this book's second half, however, I will be shifting the focus from the meta-aesthetic and onto other aesthetic qualities.
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- Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics , pp. 133 - 192Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009