ABSTRACT
In “Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama.” Stephen Orgel analyzes the important role played by genre in the identity formation in Renaissance England. “The genres for such Renaissance critics [as Scaliger and Sidney],” he writes, “were not sets of rules but classifications, ways of organizing our knowledge of the past so that we may understand our relation to it and locate its virtues in ourselves. The ancient world, says Scaliger’s Poetics, is not a world of monuments. It is real and recoverable, and the process of creation is also a process of re-creation” (Orgel 1979: 115). Orgel’s analysis extends the boundaries of an earlier argument made by another astute critic of the Renaissance, Rosalie Colie, in The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance (1973). In the foreword to this influential book, Barbara Lewalski provides a succinct summary of Colie’s complex argument regarding the function of genre in the Renaissance: “Miss Colie persuades her audience to acknowledge their constant and inevitable dependence upon genre (kind) for any apprehension of reality in life as in literature, and then displays how genre functions as a mode of communication - a set of recognized frames and fixes upon the world. In this perspective genre is not only a matter of literary convention... but it is also a myth or metaphor for man’s vision of truth” (Colie 1973: viii). Generic thought of the Renaissance thus can be understood, following Colie and Orgel, as a method of recovering and classifying past thoughts and virtues - it is a tool for an archeology of knowledge not to be revered as monumental, but to be re-formed, re-cast, and re-created in the text.
