If theatre staged possibility in the immediacy of performance, the allegories of the medieval and Renaissance imagination layered possibility into symbolic systems designed for interpretation. Allegory does not simply tell a story; it encodes one world within another, building narrative machines that multiply potential meanings.
Medieval allegories such as Everyman or Dante’s Divine Comedy structure reality as a field of correspondences. Earthly acts mirror cosmic orders, and journeys through forests or cities unfold as metaphors for the soul’s path. Here, construal is recursive: narrative becomes a symbolic map of possibility where each figure and episode opens into another layer of significance. Allegory multiplies potential through a system of relations, constraining interpretation within a symbolic order yet enabling endless elaboration.
The Renaissance intensifies this dynamic by bringing allegory into dialogue with humanism and emergent modernity. Spenser’s Faerie Queene weaves together chivalric adventure, moral instruction, and national myth. Metaphor becomes a tool of invention, allowing poets and playwrights to reconstrue politics, virtue, and desire within richly layered symbolic fields. Shakespeare’s plays, though not strictly allegorical, harness metaphor to create characters and worlds that resonate across registers—personal, social, and cosmic.
These allegorical systems function as engines of symbolic imagination: narrative machines that stage and multiply possibility through structured doubling, correspondence, and layering. They both discipline interpretation—constraining horizons through theological, ethical, or political codes—and unleash proliferations of meaning beyond the author’s intent.
In allegory and metaphor, symbolic construal reveals itself not as static reflection but as dynamic invention: a way of building worlds within worlds, shaping how possibility itself can be construed, navigated, and transformed.
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