Carnival and Plot in King Henry IV | Carnival and Plot in King Henry IV
Carnival and Plot in King Henry IV
Jonathan Hall, University of Hong Kong
Bakhtin's concept of the carnival is useful for tracing out the inner conflicts in the discourse of King Henry IV Parts 1 and 2. But, in itself the idea of the indebtedness of Shakespeare to the forms of popular festivity is by no means new. Bakhtin's contribution lies in the way in which the popular forms themselves are thought out in terms of a semiotic conflict between "monologism" and "dialogism," and this, in my view, forces us to attend to the unconscious aspect of ideological misrecognition which Louis Althusser has called "interpellation."1 Bakhtin himself avoided these problems, even though a major thrust in his theory is concerned with the historical suppression of popular, carnivalesque "dialogism" at the hands of the rationalistic "monologism" of the centralizing nation states. A helpful starting point for rethinking both...
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