Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama: Epic Structures in Shakespeare’s Pericles (1607/ 08) Christine Schwanecke 1 Studying Genre for the Future: The Politics of Generic Hybridity and the Political Dimensions of Genre Theory Pointing out the disparity between pressing problems of the twenty-first century and a cultural criticism that falls short of tackling these very problems, Ansgar Nünning demands that the study of culture be reframed and reshaped in a way that it enables researchers to take responsibility of the future (2020: 29-31). In the face of the current debates on the importance of the humanities and the blatant institutional devaluation of the ‘humanist reason’ (Hayot 2021), it cannot be reiterated often enough that the study of literature and culture partakes in its own annihilation if it is not changed into a problem-solving paradigm. Much like the arts, literary and cultural studies have the social obligation to construct productive ways towards sustainable futures. As drama scholar Siân Adiseshiah frames it, also by way of referencing a New York theatre practitioner: Drama is both an embodied and dialogic experience, an experience befitting a perform‐ ance of critical engagement with the prevailing system, as well as an opportunity to participate in a collective act of social dreaming. Ezra Brain, a trans theatre practitioner from New York writes, ‘[t]he world is broken - any child can tell you that. So, instead of simply churning out play after play that tells our audiences the world is broken, we should try to paint an image of the future. What could a future world look like? How do we get there? We should begin to think about creating visions of liberation, not just constant performances of oppression’. (Adiseshiah 2023: 189) Like drama and theatre itself, the disciplines concerned with the study of these very art forms - in particular, literary studies and genre studies - have to at least 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 1 See also Jan Rupp’s contribution to this volume. attempt to function as problem solvers. Not just recent drama, but also the case of ‘Instapoetry’, since 2018 a highly vibrant, evolving new genre, brings this necessity to the fore. 1 JuEunhae Knox, James Mackay, and Anna Nacher (2023) demonstrate how a conservative study of literature that has not yet realised that the digital age engenders generic hybridity like none before, disparages and marginalises unconventional genres all too quickly, often purely on the basis of their alleged ‘impurity’. And they call for a presentand future-oriented literary criticism that seriously acknowledges and open-mindedly assesses new literary forms, which are more often hybrid than not, that is, polygeneric, multimodal, and digital. This chapter, too, considers the relationship between literary studies, genre theory, and politics. Contrary to notions that hold that these concepts surely cannot be related to each other, the present chapter delineates some of the ways in which they can and do. In line with the arguments of Nünning, Hayot, Adiseshiah, as well as Knox, Mackay, and Nacher, this study regards decisions made by literary criticism as political decisions. Literary studies not only decide their own fate by choosing their concerns, methods, and trajectories or by paying heed and living up to their political responsibility; choosing and constructing research objects and theories, they also make political decisions; they decide what to discuss, canonise, or marginalise. Genre theory is a particular case in point. As Vijkay Bhatia points out from another angle, genre knowledge is ‘classified’ knowledge, one mainly accessible to privileged, educated elites, who arguably “exploit generic conventions to create new forms […] [, an option] available only to those few who enjoy a certain degree of visibility in the relevant professional community” (1997: 359). Despite the shared interest in genre and politics, this article is less interested in the mechanisms of social exclusion/ inclusion in processes of literary exchange; rather, it is interested in the politics of canonisation and the exclusion/ inclusion of literary works, and in making literary scholars aware of these politics in the hope of making them ‘fit for the future’. The present study does not tackle the political problems surrounding genre formation, generic practice, and consumption; rather, it is interested in the question of how genre theory and politics intersect; and it traces potential consequences of these generic-political entanglements, consequences that a genre criticism that is dedicated to working as a problem-solving paradigm has to deal with. Looking at literary theory and genre theory from a self-reflexive and critical perspective, I would like to engage with the ideological assumptions on which 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 108 Christine Schwanecke ‘we’ - the scholars of literary studies - base our theories and our theoretical endeavours every day. And I would like to deal with the political effects of our doings - be they academic or non-academic in nature. I will examine the interrelations of ‘genre theory’, ‘genre politics’, and ‘English drama history’. My survey takes the discussion on Instapoetry on a higher plane, arguing, with David Duff, that generic preferences, or, if you will, ‘generic tastes’, have, in the history of genre theory and criticism, often been communicated as norms and laws (2000); sometimes as descriptive ones, sometimes as prescriptive ones. Either way, they have always shaped the realities and futures of genres, their esteem, development, distribution, and consumption. Taking a closer look at the mechanisms of genre theory in the realm of drama theory, I will delineate how certain ‘generic preferences’ have been communicated with regard to the genre of drama. I will study the ways in which they have shaped academic and non-academic realities and in which they influenced practices of art production and consumption. By means of a diachronic perspective, I will examine how they have, in the academic realm of drama history, become visible in canonisation practices or in the selection and construction of study objects; I will also assess how generic preferences have shaped the production of plays and their reception in the non-academic realm, namely, the theatre. In other words, I will gauge how they have shaped theatre realities, inducing directors to stage plays or, respectively, to ignore them. Acknowledging these preferences and recognising their mechanisms, literary scholars in general and genre theorists in particular will be well equipped to counteract purist tendencies as well as to shape unbiased generic futures and praxeological ways of ‘doing genre’. By way of example, I would like to focus on the peculiar relation between the concepts of ‘drama’ and ‘narration’. As I have shown elsewhere, the two concepts have traditionally not gone very well together (Schwanecke 2022: 3- 12). According to the alleged ‘laws’ of modern genre theory, drama and narrative have been conceptualised as two spheres that are divided by an unbridgeable chasm: They have been framed as “a contradiction in terms” (Tönnies and Flotmann 2011a: 9) or an “insurmountable opposition” (Genette 1988 [1983]: 41). And yet, they have come together in historical genre practice (Schwanecke 2022: 358-377). I will zoom in on a play which, in the course of its academic and non-academic reception history, has come to be marginalised on the scholarly page and on the stage: William Shakespeare’s and George Wilkins’ Pericles (1607/ 08). Because it has been regarded as ‘too impure’, as ‘too hybrid’, as ‘too undramatic’ - in short, because genre theory and practice was, once more, lagging behind artistic 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 109 reality and creativity. Because genre theory refused to function as a problemsolving paradigm. Instead of solving the problem of how to describe and stage a dramatic work that challenges a straightforward generic categorisation, genre theory and theatre either ignored the decidedly hybrid, polygeneric play or problematised its resistance to traditional classification and pushed it towards the “periphery” of the Shakespearean canon (Mowat 1977: xiv). Conservative points of view, for instance, Barbara Mowat’s, dichotomise ‘the dramatic’ and the ‘narrative’ in Pericles. The critic frames storytelling as something that does not belong to ‘the dramatic’, that is a disturbing imposition on it, that ‘breaks’ it: “the dramatic illusion [is] repeatedly broken through narrative intrusion” (Mowat 1977: 99, original emphasis). In spite of these calls of discontent, Pericles can be assessed in a completely different, farsighted way. It can be regarded as a play with exciting tensions between ‘the dramatic’ and ‘the narrative’. These tensions have obviously contradicted hegemonic expectations of drama and predominant ‘generic preference rules’, which is presumably why they have been underacknowledged and unexplored for so long. It is high time that this is changed and that they receive the critical attention they deserve. In the following, I will illuminate the preferences of modern genre theory, or ‘laws of genre’ in the terms of Jacques Derrida, when it comes to the nexus of ‘drama’ and ‘narration’ as well as the politics of canonical inclusion and exclusion based on these laws. To do this, I will, firstly and in a genre-historical vein, consider the dynamics of generic tastes by way of an example and zoom in on Pericles’ critical and artistic reception history (Section 2); secondly, I will base my argument genre-theoretically on Derrida’s essay “The Law of Genre” (2000 [1980]; Section 3). Thirdly, I will counter the hegemonic laws of genre theory and literary criticism by bringing together what has been deemed ‘inappropriate’ so far: I will reconnect drama and narrative so that the former stops to “occupy the position of narratology’s non-narrative Other” (Fludernik 2010 [1996]: 333). To use literary studies in general and genre theory in particular as problem-solving tools, I argue that we have to reframe dominant premises that concern genre and the ‘system of genres’. The latter is in urgent need of being reframed as a “polygenetic system [sic]”, which “turns observed variety from problem to structural principle” (Mentz 2017: 238). Situating the play’s polygeneric structure in a system in which “hybridity, change, and generic instability are ordering principles, not deviations from fixed marks” (ibid.), one can discard the notion that Pericles is a ‘problematic’ or ‘broken’ play in any way. Instead, one will finally be able to not only adequately analyse the play, but also to show that it does not have to hide behind any other Shakespearean 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 110 Christine Schwanecke 2 Even though these ideas of scholarly detachment to the study object have been challenged, they seem appealing to this very day. Most likely any student of literature and/ or literary scholar has experienced this themselves, acting upon assumptions of a generally unbiased, intersubjective valid practice of literary criticism for pragmatic reasons in the day-to-day business of ‘doing’ literary theory (e.g. by engaging in processes of canonisation, periodisation, literary analysis, or interpretation that are, at least, made intersubjectively traceable and, thus, a common frame of reference for a certain research community at a certain time). products, which happen to be said to better match the generic ‘facts’ and ‘norms’ that modern genre theory has fabricated and communicated. 2 Out of Date and Out of Favour? From Shakespeare’s Pericles as ‘Problem’ in Genre Theory and Theatre History to Pericles as Part of a Problem-Solving Strategy I ground this essay on the assumption that genre theory partakes in worldmak‐ ing, or, factmaking (Nünning 2023). Being written and received, it generates facts, ‘facts of communication’, which people - scholars, students - engaging in literary studies take for granted. But the facts of genre theory, its objects and concepts are wo/ man-made (lat. facere, factum); they are made in a certain culture and at a certain time in history. As such, they are, much like canonisation processes (e.g. Douglas 2012), far more involved in the politics of ‘personal taste’ or the preference of a scientific community than ‘modern’ - e.g. romanticist, formalist, and structuralist - genre theories have arguably made us believe (because they strife for objectivity; e.g. Duff 2000; Basseler, Nünning, and Schwanecke 2013: 5-9). 2 Based on these ideas and with the volume’s central impetus in mind - the question of what literary studies can do for the future - it becomes clear that they have to partake in highlighting the constructedness of genres in order to create more diverse and non-biased universes for unusual, experimental, or hybrid genres. It is high time that the ideas of recent genre theories that inquire into this direction are highlighted, advertised, and communicated. Recent scholarship has taken a praxeological stance, focusing on the practices involved in ‘doing genre’. In a groundbreaking metatheoretical study, Angela Gencarelli enquires into the ways in which academia and non-academic key players in literary culture partake in the active construction of genres, in ‘the making’ of genres. Based on the thesis that common, acknowledged generic practices (e.g. canonisation and anthologisation) are implicit acts of evaluation, she abstracts a matrix of dominant strategies in both literary industry and literary studies that contribute to either a genre’s success or to its demise. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 111 3 A literary genre that centres around the description and discussion of animals. 4 How ubiquitous genre theory’s practice of problem constructing rather than solving can be, is pertinently highlighted by Claudia Hillebrand (forthcoming), who reflects the famous “Lyrik-Problem” described by Rüdiger Zymner and who asks to what extent a praxeological approach that constitutes poetry as social practice can contribute to the reduction or even solution of this so-called ‘poetry problem’. Taking her cue from the hybrid genre of the Bestiarium, 3 she convincingly illustrates how stakeholders in genre theory and practice ‘do genre’, how they tend to produce and constitute genres; and how their ‘doings’ stabilise genres or destabilise them, sometimes contributing to their success, sometimes to their disappearance (Gencarelli 2024). Emphasising that ‘doing genre’ is not to be understood as an isolated act of single actors, but as dynamic negotiation and open-ended interplay between different actors and institutions, she comes to the conclusion that, from a praxeological point of view, genre emergence and remodelling are the result of an incalculable interplay between different stakeholders that can only be reconstructed retrospectively. Agreeing with her on her demand that a genre theory is praxeologically reframed and the historical development of genres be remodelled, I disagree with her conclusion that generic emergence and change is the result of an incalculable interplay between different players which can only be reconstructed retrospectively. What literary studies can learn from the praxeological standpoint for the future is this: We very much engage - in our very presence, not just in retrospect - in the construction of genres, with our preferences and tastes, with our implicit beliefs and tacitly taken-for-granted theories. This is why it is necessary to highlight that we should question ‘laws of genre’ more often; and to reframe generic laws and norms as ‘preferences’. In addition, we have to historicize them, reflect in which academic time they have been made as historia rerum gestarurm and for which time, i.e., for which res gestae. We have to make genre theory fit for the future by using it as a problemsolving instrument instead of constructing problems with it 4 by isolating genres that do not fit traditional expectations, thus engaging in kinds of ‘doing genre’ that fail to do any justice to new, hybrid, exceptional genres and lead to their marginalisation and demise. If we reframe generic laws and norms as ‘preferences’, we have to consider them in three ways: firstly, as the attempt to express a personal taste in an intersubjectively comprehensible way; because if people prefer one thing over the other, they like something better or best, and they try to promote it as such. Secondly, as an ideologically informed action, “the act, fact, or principle of giving advantages to some over others” (“Preference” Merriam-Webster, 20 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 112 Christine Schwanecke January 2025: n.pag.), because the actions of ‘writing genre’ and ‘doing genre’, i.e. genre theory and practice, are based on a certain set of beliefs. Thirdly, genre preference is related to politics and power; because excluding drama from narratology is a predilection. It is the expression of “a greater liking for one alternative [fiction] over another or others [plays]” (“Preference” OED, 20 January 2025: n.pag.): It advances narrative to a higher rank or position than drama; and the latter is not deemed worthy of narratological consideration. Taking practices of ‘doing genre’ into account, we have to reconceptualise genre norms as historically variable tastes and their conceptualisations as ideologically based political actions. Genre theory as well as literary production and reception are based on the construction of and the discrimination between different genres. Often, these processes go together with values of judgement: In her article “Marginalizing Drama: Bakhtin’s Theory of Genre”, Jennifer Wise describes the influential ‘politics’ of Bakhtinean taste. According to the genre theorist, Bakhtinean theories of the novel (e.g. Bakhtin 1981 [1975]) and his framings of what is excellent and exceptional in literature have had their share in shaping academic and popular preferences in a way that has resulted in the marginalisation and ‘othering’ of genres equally interesting and innovative, such as drama. They have also promoted the value of generic homogeneity over works which can be regarded as heterogeneous, like Pericles, which features both dramatic as well as narrative qualities. And, just like general, unspecified preferences, genre history and their politics are prone to change with the historically changing and culturally variable perceptions of literary excellence and favoured genres. This becomes especially evident when one looks at the ‘margins’ of the body of Shakespeare’s dramatic work. Amongst this body, which, in general, can be said to have appealed to popular tastes transhistorically and transnationally, there are works which were strongly subjected to the historically changing dynamics of the generic ‘styles favoured in different ages’ and which have, in the course of their history, become marginalised. There is arguably no play like Shakespeare’s Pericles to better exemplify the historically fickle politics of generic preferences. As Leslie Dunton-Downer and Alan Riding remark, “[t]he play proved an immense hit with Jacobean audiences, but it never recovered its popularity after London’s theatres were closed […] [in] 1642” (2014 [2004]: 403). And, indeed, one look at the MLA international bibliography and one at the performance database of the renowned Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) confirm: What was once popular enough to have even been termed a ‘hit’ seems now strangely out of date; no longer preferred, out of taste. And this is arguably 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 113 5 Even in comparison to plays of other Shakespearean genres, that is, of his tragedies (TRAG), comedies (COM), and histories (HIST; see Fig. 1) - with Othello, As You Like It, and King John not even the most popular representatives of their kind -, Pericles occupies a marginal position (with the exception of King John in the MLA search). because of its generic hybridity, its inclusion of narrative features and epic character. Key Words MLA hits on 16 April 2022 (search for “Shakespeare + play title”) RSC data base search on 19 April 2022 (search for “play title”) Pericles (RO) 465 publications 14 RSC productions (1900-now) Cymbeline (RO) 571 publications 27 RSC productions (1884-now) A Winter’s Tale (RO) 1.096 publications 49 RSC productions (1895-now) The Tempest (RO) 2.457 publications 58 RSC productions (1891-now) Othello (TRAG) 2.647 publications 49 RSC productions (1880-now) As You Like It (COM) 769 publications 93 RSC productions (1879-now) King John (HIST) 352 publications 24 RSC productions (1890-now) Tab. 1: Tastes of literary critics and RSC artists (maybe even Shakespeare audiences) in numbers: A comparison between Pericles, the other romances (‘RO’), and representatives of other Shakespearean subgenres in terms of critical and theatrical acknowledgement. If one compares the 465 publications on Pericles to the 571 publications on Cymbeline and even 2.457 publications on the The Tempest, one can see that the romance Pericles has been substantially less dignified with critical attention than its generic counterparts (see Tab. 1). 5 In comparison to both other romances and plays of other subgenres, one can see that, even with regard to non-academic tastes, Pericles seems to have lost its initially tremendous appeal to producers and perhaps even audiences. With just fourteen productions since 1900, the RSC has displayed less interest in staging Pericles than in any other canonised Shakespeare play. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 114 Christine Schwanecke The politics of marginalising Pericles in its recent academic and non-academic reception has to be considered together with other evident mechanisms of academic and non-academic criticism: the politics of discriminating against plays that seem ‘not dramatic enough’ or ‘too narrative’. These politics are less ‘recent’ than the ones marginalising Pericles; they can be traced back to the Renaissance, for example, with Ben Johnson calling Pericles a “mouldy tale” (Bloom 1998: 603). Suzan Gossett (2004: 3-4) attributes this disavowing of Pericles not to the fact that the play was disliked by Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights. Rather, she suspects the bard’s contemporaries of having envied his play’s success and the fact that it so obviously appealed to the masses (ibid.: 4). And the play was not only disliked by fellow artists but also by critics. It has repeatedly been called “one of Shakespeare’s lesser romances” (Dunton-Downer and Riding 2014: 403, emphasis added), a play that displays a “patchy” quality (ibid.: 408), that is “uneven”, “peculiar in genre” (Bloom 1998: 603), and even ‘odd’ or “strange” (ibid.: 604f.); in short, it has been defamed as a ‘problematic’ play. 3 Reframing ‘Laws of Genre’ as ‘Preferences of Genre’: The Politics of the ‘Do-s’ and ‘Don’t-s’ of Genre Theory and History Critics have looked for reasons of Pericles’ contemporary marginalisation and it being considered ‘problematic’. They have come up with a variety of reasons, ranging from the play’s unusual print history (Gossett 2004: 10-30) to the text’s poor quality in terms of its ‘preservation’ (Döring 2009) and to its unclear authorship (Bloom 1998: 603); it is suspected to be co-authored by George Wilkins. The peculiar situation of Pericles has, however, never been considered from the perspective of ‘the politics of generic preferences’ - even though the qualitative statements above indicate the legitimisation of such a consideration. Reframing genre norms as preferences and historicizing them, one realises however that it is not Pericles that is the problem, but genre theory. In the treatment of Pericles and its historically changing aesthetic apprecia‐ tion, the implicit power mechanisms of critical preferences and the hidden ideologies of modern genre theory are epitomised. How Pericles might have come to be treated as it has been becomes evident upon reading Derrida’s “The Law of Genre” in terms of the ‘politics of genre’. In the course of the play’s academic and non-academic reception history, ‘generic preferences’ must have unnoticedly become laws; and this process is, at least in part, what Derrida has called ‘the law of genre’. In other words, culturally and historically specific 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 115 preferences of genre distinction and generic homogeneity have been veiled as transhistorical, universal laws. Derrida bases his idea of ‘the law of genre’ on the fact that genres and communicative acts of generic attributions establish limits; in our case, these limits might, if one applies his terminology, look like this: If critics say ‘Pericles is a play’, it is, to them and others, based on Derrida’s idea, automatically not a novel, not an epic, and not a poem. If they say ‘Pericles is a romance’, as I have done above, it is automatically not a history, a tragedy, or a comedy. Derrida goes on, “[a]nd when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: ‘Do’, ‘Do not’ says ‘genre’, the word ‘genre’, the figure, the voice, or the law of genre. […] Thus, as soon as a genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation” (Derrida 2000: 221). If one sees genres as critically employed lines of demarcations, genres become, once more, graspable in terms of ‘preference’, namely as defined in the OED, as a “discriminative faculty” (2023: n.pag.). Studies in genre theory and criticism as well as the concepts they preferably apply can, therefore, no longer be perceived as innocent and ‘objective’ laws and heuristic tools for literary classification and interpretation. Rather, they have to be understood as manifestations of preferences, tastes of individual scholars, ideologically informed concepts groups of scholars refer to and use, as well as implicit instruments of political power mechanisms of academic communities. What has happened to Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories, which have been “viewed in terms alien to their thinking” (Derrida 2000: 225), can be said to have happened to Pericles - its character, structure, and modes of representation have been increasingly judged a-historically, by modern critical preference rules, generic tastes, and demarcations, which have become hegemonic, which have come to be regarded as ‘natural’, but which, in fact, do not have anything to do with the play’s actual character or with early modern tastes and rules in drama production and reception. But what are these Renaissance terms and rules? They are certainly less prone to the modern tastes of genre purity, singularity in authorship, and perfection in matters of edition history, which have been shaped by Romantic rules and tastes (Duff 2000) and against which, in retrospect, Pericles, the ‘odd’ play, the ‘patchy’ play, has been-- ill-fittingly and a-historically-- measured. With the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, criticism has often attributed narrativity and the existence of diegetic elements exclusively to the novel. Under this hegemonic critical preference in the normalised guise of a very special genre law, namely ‘novels tell stories’, or - in Derrida’s terms - ‘Play, do be mimetic! ’ and ‘Play, don’t feature any narrative elements! ’, Pericles’ complex and rich features of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 116 Christine Schwanecke narrativity and epic strategies have been excluded from critical observation. The play has been misunderstood, misrepresented, and devalued. In the wake of Barbara Hardy’s, Ansgar Nünning’s, and others’ attempts to advertise the critical acknowledgement of narrative elements in drama, genre preferences have to be critically reflected and even remodelled when it comes to drama in general (see Hardy 1997; Schwanecke 2022) and Pericles in particular (Nünning and Sommer 2008). Reframing Pericles, which has so far been considered problematic, as ‘narrative’, I will not only counter the marginalisation of plays that have so far not matched the hegemonic critical taste but also assess a formally rich and stimulating play - fairly and anew. 4 From the ‘Problem’ to a ‘Challenge’, and even ‘Gift’: Pericles as ‘Narrative Drama’ Even though Pericles has never been explicitly called a ‘problem play,’ it has been experienced as a problematic play because critics have felt that it “abandoned [generic conventions]” (Mowat 1977: 99). But Shakespeare and Wilkins cannot have ‘abandoned’ what has become a convention, a generic “sense of what is appropriate, harmonious, or beautiful” (OED 2023: n.pag.) only much later, arguably in Romanticism (Duff 2000: 3-6). This is why a ‘fresh’ examination seems in order; an examination which is, similar to the studies by the critics mentioned above, aware of the historically variable politics of ‘generic preferences’; and an examination that does not frame ‘narrative’ as the other of ‘drama’, but which builds on Barbara Hardy’s paradigmatic idea that “[n]arrative art takes many different forms: drama is one of these forms” (1997: 13). Even though against this backdrop, all plays can be said to ‘tell stories’, there are certainly those in which ‘storytelling’ is particularly salient (see Schwanecke 2020, 2021, 2022). One of these is Pericles (see Schwanecke 2022: 132-42). And although I am about to construct and communicate a generic preference myself now, I will, for heuristic purposes, generically label plays like these ‘narrative plays’. To consider which forms and functions narrative art takes in the present play, I will zoom in on three of the multifaceted ways in which storytelling is highlighted and instrumentalised in Pericles for dramatic purposes. Pericles features epic structures in at least three ways: (1) it contains episodic elements, drawing on narrative romances, (2) it displays spots of meta-storytelling, and (3) it stages a story that is told. Ad (1): With its primary motifs and structure, Shakespeare’s and Wilkins’ story of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, can be said to draw on the style of ancient 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 117 6 Cf. Aristotle’s Poetics, in which the author demands that one event in drama must necessarily result from previous actions (‘unity of action’). Greek Romance: As Suzanne Gossett remarks, “[a]s a romance hero, Pericles travels and has adventures throughout the ancient world” (2004: 107) to find a wife and expand his kingdom. In accordance with its romance content, the play features an episodic, processional narrative typical of romance. Even though there is an overarching story (the story of Pericles’ life), the episodes remain separate, largely independent stories: Succeeding each other in chronological order, they are temporally related rather than causally. They are linked, but by an implicit ‘and then’. To illustrate: The play starts with Pericles solving the riddle pertaining to King Antiochus’ and his relationship to Antiochus’ daughter; ‘and then’ Pericles wins a tournament and, with it, a wife, Thaisa; ‘and then’ his wife dies giving birth at sea; her seemingly dead body thrown into the water; ‘and then’ Thaisa is washed ashore and miraculously becomes alive again; ‘and then’ their daughter, Marina, is given away to foster parents; ‘and then’ the foster family spin a plot to kill her because she is more beautiful than their own daughter; ‘and then’ Marina is abducted by pirates; ‘and then’ Marina is brought to a brothel but is able to keep her virginity; ‘and then’ Pericles, Thaisa, and Marina are reunited; ‘and then’ Marina marries Lysimachus, Governor of Mytilene, and makes her parents happy. As you can see from my highlighting the ‘and then’-s between the individual episodes or ‘mini-stories’, each of which could stand on its own, few events in the play are - in a totally un-Aristitotelean manner 6 - necessarily tied to previous actions. By way of this formal particularity, Shakespeare and Wilkins provided a small treasure box of individual gems of stories. With variations on romance plots, on motifs of medieval legend (e.g. the tournament), and on ancient tales (e.g. the story of ‘Pericles’), the authors provided potential links to which their audience with its knowledge of stories could relate to. Acknowl‐ edging the playwrights’ mixing of old, well-known stories, their providing new variations on them, and their dramatising them in surprising combinations, helps understand how the playwrights were able to create a dramatic story - packed with suspense, pacing from episodic climax to episodic climax -, which became an enjoyable ‘hit’ with its historical audiences and which can become a hit (again) today; especially if artists, audiences, and critics dared to be more open to ‘generic tastes’ foreign to their own. Ad (2): Beside the play’s structure, Pericles’ instances of implicit and explicit meta-references to stories and storytelling provide an enhancement of the dramatic homage to the enjoyment of stories and to stories in themselves. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 118 Christine Schwanecke 7 That the play is to serve this purpose is made clear right in the beginning: It is “[t]o glad your [= the audience’s] ear and please your eyes” (Per I.i.3f.). Intertextual references to Greek epics and Roman myths - e.g. to the Iliad’s “Trojan horse” (Pericles 1.4.91) or to the goddess Diana (Per 5.1.227-236) - make the drama not only narratively denser, they also link the story of Pericles to arguably some of the greatest narratives of mankind. By invoking these myths, Shakespeare and Wilkins seem to invoke their ancient functions, too: firstly, to respond to people’s need to narratively make sense of the world they live in and, secondly, to provide answers to basic questions of human existence. The stories in Pericles are brought into the vicinity of these ancient myths and epic narratives. With this, stories and their functions are made to appear universal; they can be realised diegetically, dramatically, and across all ages. In addition to the genreand time-transcending functions of stories, another quality of stories is invoked and hailed. In explicit references to storytelling, their task as imaginative shelters in times of crises is reflected. In one of the play’s episodes, the impoverishment and hunger of the people of Tarsus are made topics. In this critical situation, the Governor of Tarsus asks his wife, “[m]y Dionyza, shall we rest us here | And by relating tales of others’ griefs | See if ’twill teach us to forget our own? ” (Per 1.4.1-3). The suggestion to ‘tell each other tales of others’ griefs’ is made in a threatening and potentially deadly situation. And the Governor of Tarsus, at his wit’s end, sees his only rescue in narrative distraction. His wife challenges his point of view, however. As such, stories’ potential as hope of shelter are reflected and discussed in the storyworld, while one of the purposes of theatrical storytelling, the distraction through entertainment, is directly fulfilled in the extra-textual world, upon Pericles being watched or read. 7 Ad (3): To underline that the audiences are presented with a tale, one which poses existential questions and, at the same time, provides entertainment, Shakespeare and Wilkins appoint a storyteller, John Gower. Gower is based on a historical figure, a fourteenth-century English poet, who, in Pericles, guides audiences and readers through the drama’s action (parts of which originate from the historical Gower’s tetrameter poem Confessio Amantis, 1393). With Gower and his repeated entrances, which have been experienced as ‘disturbing’ under the paradigm of the modern ‘generic taste’ (see fn. 2), and with his explicit references to storytelling, the play is actually given even more coherence. This is achieved in at least three ways: Firstly, references such as “[t]o sing a song that old was sung | From ashes ancient Gower is come” (Per 1.1.1-2) make clear that, in addition to narrative as form (Romance), and narrative as world explanation 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 119 models (myths, epics), old practices and customs of storytelling, such as the tradition of oral storytelling by the ‘ancient bard’, are revived and worshipped. Secondly, the play is staged as part of a storytelling tradition; the character of Gower ‘sings a song that old was song’. With this, Shakespeare and Wilkins not only actively refer to their source (i.e. the real Gower’s verses); they also show what they have done to them: They have put them in dramatic form (Per 1.1.3-4; 2.0.15-16.). Epic structures and narrative elements are thus employed not as a disturbance, but as a source of creative consistence; they pervade the play in many forms and on many levels. Thirdly, the play brings together traditions of ‘the dramatic’ and ‘the narra‐ tive’. With Gower, Shakespeare and Wilkins do not abandon dramatic ways of storytelling at all: Employing a narrator, they revive the tradition of the choir of the Greek tragedy, which introduces, comments on, interprets, and abstracts what has happened in the storyworld. In doing so, they address not only the merits of narrative but also of drama. And they even celebrate the combination of these qualities: As one of the historical title pages suggests, the union of a “much admired Play” and one “whole Historie” (see Fig. 1) is something that can be proudly advertised (and sold). If one, along these lines, acknowledges Pericles’ narrative quality and analyses its synthesis of dramatic and narrative qualities, its artistic density and coher‐ ence, one will find the following: Generically and aesthetically, Pericles does no longer pose a ‘problem’; rather, it becomes a ‘challenge’. And, to be even bolder, given the play’s formal richness and density, one can even regard it as a ‘gift’; one that has been waiting to be further ‘unwrapped’ and explored by a genre theory and history that is conscious of the politics and power of generic tastes and preferences. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 120 Christine Schwanecke 8 Source: https: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Pericles,_Prince_of_Tyre#/ media/ File: Pericles_1 609.jpg (Accessed: 23 February 2023). Fig. 1: Title page of the quarto edition of Wilkins and Shakespeare’s Pericles (1609). 8 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 121 5 The Potential Benefits of Unveiling The ‘Politics of Generic Preferences’ for Genre Theory and Theatre History: Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama With my conceptualisation of Pericles as narrative play and my short analysis and interpretation of it, I hope to have strengthened an awareness of the politics of genre theory and the importance of praxeological perspectives which draw attention to these very politics. Modern critical preferences have often failed to capture or misrepresented the actual generic conventions of historical study objects, such as Shakespeare’s and Wilkins’ play. The facts that the existence of Pericles’ rich variety of epic structures has been largely ignored (with some exceptions; cf. Nünning and Sommer 2008; Schwanecke 2022: 134-42), and that the play’s heightened degree of (dramatic) narrativity has been perceived as disturbing attest to the pitfalls of modern hegemonic genre theory. A system that is normalised and endowed with an air of objectivity, its preferences and politics often remain, regrettably, unchallenged. To look at these assumed ‘norms’ and laws in the way they are communicated in their respective contexts does not only enable genre theorists and literary historians to reveal the very preferences of scholars, groups of scholars, and their times, but also to dissect the ways in which these laws have shaped and determined (culturally and historically changing) academic and non-academic contexts and, with them, practices of judging, distributing, receiving, and consuming certain genres and genre products. To unveil the politics of generic preferences, to historicize and critically question them helps both academic and non-academic recipients to distance themselves from these politics, to trace historical concepts and their emanations in both drama as res gestae and theory as historia rerum gestarum, and, hopefully, to engage in developing historically and culturally sensitive new categories and concepts, such as ‘narrative drama’. To learn from the historical example of Pericles, to regard the generic system as a polygeneric one, and to integrate praxeological perspectives into genre theory and practice have become the commandments of the hour. Thus equipped for the future, literary scholars become more aware of the benefits of genres of the future, such as the evolving genres of the internet that are polygeneric in their design, multimedial in their form, and resist straightforward classification. It becomes easier to assess emergent genres like twitterature and Instapoetry not as problematic genres, but as ones that are rich in their polygenericity and innovativeness, and to analyse them accordingly. It is suddenly possible to ‘do genre’ in less biased, more responsible, and more sustainable ways. To historicize generic preferences, rules, and norms leads also to the reas‐ sessment of past assumptions. It allows for the realisation that Pericles might 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 122 Christine Schwanecke be much more innovative - generically and thematically - than a large body of modern criticism has so far made its recipients believe. It not only allows the exploration of epic structures in dramatic form, it also makes gauging their performative, cultural power on the historical stage possible. By presenting a host of diverse episodes, that is, mini-stories within one play, by including meta-referential remarks on storytelling, and by implementing a highly salient narrator figure on an extradiegetic level, Shakespeare and Wilkins not only cross the boundaries of conventional dramatic literature. They also use narrative to perform genre politics on stage: What would normally have been considered plainly a play is converted into quasi-narrative literature, similar to myth, folklore, and medieval tale collections orally performed. And in this lies immense performative power. While, on the story level and regarding the life of the eponymous hero, Pericles, clear-cut episodes and morals prevail, Pericles’ structural traits undermine the one-dimensional interpretations of the play. Performing this discrepancy, Pericles is, as Julie Grant Moore states, “a play that uses generic conventions [and their transgression] to challenge […] generic, political, and social assumptions” (2003: 33). Defying prevalent “moralistic reading[s]” (Sprang 2011: 118), the authors’ generic trans‐ gressions present the relatively simple morals of the individual episodes not as veritable historical facts, but as narratives; stories put forth by a narrator, Gower. Thus, they are performed and judged as “lies | disdained in the reporting” (V.i.109 f.). Miracles, simplistic worldviews, clear dichotomies of good and bad are, through the three ways in which they are dramatically ‘reported’, judged as ‘medieval’ and ‘fictional’; and idolised mythical regents and family members are assessed as one-dimensional characters of rather naïve fairy tales and distant, allegedly simpler pasts. As polygenric and praxeological perspectives show, Shakespeare and Wilkins contest not only a potential contemporary desire for moral unambiguity and simplification; they also challenge a much newer desire for homogeneity and simplicity, the one put forth by modern genre theory. And in laying nuances like these bare, there lie some of the great merits of literary studies and its potential for the future. At times in which the desire for unambiguity, for simple solutions, and the lack of what has been called “Ambiguitätstoleranz” (tolerance of ambiguity) are often criticised, not only in the arts but especially in public discourse, social media, literary studies and genre studies are called upon to take on complex, hybrid issues and no longer marginalise or ignore them. They are obliged to describe, measure and assess the potential of the hybrid for the present and the future, not just intra-textually and -generically, but also with regard to its extra-textual implications for more inclusive social and cultural 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 123 futures. Performing genre transgression on the stage and advertising the union of narrative and drama in one play, Pericles, firstly, indicates that simple worlds, straightforward morals, and happy endings are no more than the material of fiction; and it, secondly, furthers the acknowledgement that the alleged facts of genre theory can be no less trouble: Fictitious and misleading, they always have to be contested and historicized. Turning towards hybrid works of the early modern era like Pericles can help us to see the potential and necessity of contemporary emerging hybrid genres. 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