The Dominant Ideology of AMND

This is a short section on a reading of the play that is concerned with Elizabethan and neo-Platonist beliefs. There’s a dominant ideology in the play, and Shakespeare’s other works, concerning a shared cultural and cosmological view of order. 

Others believe while Shakespeare deployed a dominant ideology, it was not, as Tillyard notes, as “an ideological legitimation of an existing social order.”

Tillyard also claims that “The Elizabethans pictured the universal order under three main forms: a chain, a series of corresponding planes, and a dance.”

Thomas Browne wrote, “Thus Man that great and true Amphibian whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds.”

This concerns the great chain of being, in that humans reside on top of the material chain in God’s changeless order because of their understanding of the world.

Another expression of this was the Ptolemaic Universe: Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Stellatim, Primum Mobile. The stars dictate change in sublunary things, all things above the moon were immutable, all below were imperfect and subject to mutability/change.

John Donne: “The New Philosophy calls all in doubt; the element of fire is quite put out.”

W. R. Elton: “Shakespeare’s drama provided an appropriate conflict structure: a dialectic of ironies and ambivalences, avoiding in its complex movement and multi-voiced dialogue the simplification of direct statement and reductive resolution.”

John Barton: “[Shakespeare] likes verbal complexity but is often simple and direct. His thoughts naturally shape themselves antithetically…He loves ambiguity and paradox. He delights in the sheer act of expressing himself and in handling seemingly impossible situations.”

If you can fit these quotes in your essay then this will help boost your marks in the AO3 section!