Not in this case. They've been detached from their original setting, and put in a kind of timeless state - and the characteristics of that timeless state, as they usually do in this kind of story, default to the author's own time. If I try to see Merry Wives as taking place sometime in the early 15C, it clangs. It feels Elizabethan, even as the tavern scenes in the H4 plays feel Elizabethan, and this time there's no historical 15C events to moor it at the intended time. Because these characters are the least 15C part of the actual 15C play, their ability to thus moor it is even more compromised.
By the way, if you are going to set MWW in the 15C, when does it go? Is there anything in the text addressing that question? Is it before or after H4/1? It can't be after H4/2.
I don't see this as "easy separability," but as refusing to let a misleading label blind you to what the text is actually intended to say. Perhaps this principle would be clear if the example is a roman a clef, a novel that is intended as a realistic depiction of a real person, but through reasons either of legality, coyness, or just not wanting to be held responsible for complete factual accuracy, pins a fictional name on the character and changes a few insignificant background details. For added deniability, there may be a casual mention of the actual person by name, as assurance that the protagonist must be somebody else.
Good example, though it doesn't take that last step, is "Primary Colors". To deny that it's about Bill Clinton because the character's name is Jack Stanton and some of the events have no real-life parallel would be absurd.
"1984" is a trickier case. The futuristic elements and settings are not just trappings, they're deeply embedded. And it would not be credible for the text as it stands to be titled "1948", though I have seen that position held; and it would be credible (though I have not seen any evidence that this happened) that Orwell began with the idea of writing a book called "1948" and then decided to distance it.
Nevertheless, it is an essential element of the book's power that it can be, though it doesn't necessarily have to be, read as a slightly surreal depiction of actual Soviet life in 1948 (in which case the British setting, the protagonist's name "Winston" etc. would be no more than misleading trappings, because they aren't in that way essential), and indeed many veterans of Soviet life have indeed read it exactly that way and praised it thereby.
Oh, and getting back to trappings and misleading settings? News flash: "Animal Farm" isn't about pigs.
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Date: 2013-06-08 01:28 pm (UTC)By the way, if you are going to set MWW in the 15C, when does it go? Is there anything in the text addressing that question? Is it before or after H4/1? It can't be after H4/2.
I don't see this as "easy separability," but as refusing to let a misleading label blind you to what the text is actually intended to say. Perhaps this principle would be clear if the example is a roman a clef, a novel that is intended as a realistic depiction of a real person, but through reasons either of legality, coyness, or just not wanting to be held responsible for complete factual accuracy, pins a fictional name on the character and changes a few insignificant background details. For added deniability, there may be a casual mention of the actual person by name, as assurance that the protagonist must be somebody else.
Good example, though it doesn't take that last step, is "Primary Colors". To deny that it's about Bill Clinton because the character's name is Jack Stanton and some of the events have no real-life parallel would be absurd.
"1984" is a trickier case. The futuristic elements and settings are not just trappings, they're deeply embedded. And it would not be credible for the text as it stands to be titled "1948", though I have seen that position held; and it would be credible (though I have not seen any evidence that this happened) that Orwell began with the idea of writing a book called "1948" and then decided to distance it.
Nevertheless, it is an essential element of the book's power that it can be, though it doesn't necessarily have to be, read as a slightly surreal depiction of actual Soviet life in 1948 (in which case the British setting, the protagonist's name "Winston" etc. would be no more than misleading trappings, because they aren't in that way essential), and indeed many veterans of Soviet life have indeed read it exactly that way and praised it thereby.
Oh, and getting back to trappings and misleading settings? News flash: "Animal Farm" isn't about pigs.