Thesis--Utrecht. / Vita. "Stellingen," 2 leaves inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-251).

Murdoch&rsquo / s fiction has been influenced by dramatic elements, particularly comic elements. This influence has been revealed as parody. Murdoch parodies the comic character types of the eiron, alazon, buffoon and agroikos by exaggerating and mixing their functions and themes of love, separated lovers and metamorphosis in her novels, The Nice and the Good, The Black Prince, and The Sea, The Sea. In addition, she makes parodic uses of Shakespearean plays, As You Like It and Love&#039 / s Labour&#039 / s Lost, Hamlet, and The Tempest, in her novels in question. Her use of parody as a weapon against the genre of romantic comedy, its character types and main themes is the result of her philosophical view of drama and the dramatic. She argues that comedy and tragedy deal with appearance whereas drama and the dramatic ought to involve reality. In her novels in question, she shows that the dramatic is the conflict of selfish self with itself to reach self-knowledge. Murdochian self- knowledge is the knowledge of what lies beyond self. This kind of knowledge is achieved by unselfing, a process through which a solipsistic self recognizes its solipsism and challenges it by means of love and art.

Traditionally in the field of aesthetics the genres of tragedy and comedy have been depicted in antithetical opposition to one another. Setting out from the hypothesis that antitheses are aspects of a deeper unity where one informs the construction of the other’s image this thesis questions the hierarchy of genre through a form of ludic postmodernism that interrogates aesthetics in the same way as comedy interrogates ethics and the law of genre. Tracing the chain of signification as laid out by Derrida between theatre as pharmakon and the thaumaturgical influence of the pharmakeus or dramatist, early modern comedy can be identified as re-enacting Renaissance versions of the rite of the pharmakos, where a scapegoat for the ills attendant upon society is chosen and exorcised. Recognisable pharmakoi are scapegoat figures such as Shakespeare’s Shylock, Malvolio, Falstaff and Parolles but the city comedies of this period also depict prostitutes and the unmarried as necessary comic sacrifices for the reordering of society. Throughout this thesis an attempt has been made to position Shakespeare’s comic drama in the specific historical location of early modern London by not only placing his plays in the company of his contemporaries but by forging a strong theoretical engagement with questions of law in relation to issues of genre. The connection Shakespearean comedy makes with the laws of early modern England is highly visible in The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure and The Taming of the Shrew and the laws which they scrutinise are peculiar to the regulation of gendered interaction, namely marital union and the power and authority imposed upon both men and women in patriarchal society. Thus, a pivotal section on marriage is required to pinion the argument that the libidinized economy of the early modern stage perpetuates the principle of an excluded middle, comic u-topia, or Derridean ‘non-place’, where implicit contradictions are made explicit. The conclusion that comic denouements are disappointing in their resolution of seemingly insurmountable dilemmas can therefore be reappraised as the outcome of a dialectical movement, where the possibility of alternatives is presented and assessed. Advancing Hegel’s theory that the whole of history is dialectic comedy can therefore be identified as the way in which a society sees itself, dramatically representing the hopes and fears of an entire community.