Abstract

Since the neo-classical period, critics writing about Duke Vincentio have exhibited different forms of literary provincialism , and recently these different provincial approaches have been subjected to rigorous "scientific analysis" under the influence of post-Hegelian dialectics, thus making the critical situation more complicated, if not worse. ;This writer reviews some of the criticism of the Duke in several "provincial" categories from the early conventionalism of the neo-classicists, through psychological relativism of the romanticists, down to ideological "representations" of the neo-historicists, and highlights some inadequacies of these approaches from the writer's East Asian dialogic viewpoint. ;In the concluding chapter, this writer argues for the legitimacy and usefulness of a dialogic approach to Shakespeare's characters and offers an analysis of the Duke's characteristic behavior and action in terms of dialogic tension and harmony, which characterize the Duke and the play as having a peculiar soft of "tragicomicality."