Just as Dar's *Green World* will surely occupy an important place in musical history, the term "green world" already occupies a position of importance in Shakespearean criticism. Many of you will already know the following, but I hope some of you find it to be of interest...
The term "green world" was coined by the literary critic Northrop Frye in his book *A Natural Perspective*. Frye identifies a common arc in Shakespeare's comedies and late romances: a movement from the closed world of law, reality, and convention to a "green world" of nature, imagination, magic, music, and art. Although every play concludes with a return back to the closed world, the characters usually return in some ways "translated" by their experiences in the green world, which helps to inform their (and our) experience of the mundane world.
The green world, of course, is not all sweetness and light. As dreams can also be nightmares, so does the dream-like green world contain an undertone of disorientation and fear. Usually, this takes the form of madness, or what Frye calls "confused identity." (Think, for example, of Illyria -- the green world of *Twelfth Night* -- with its motifs of illusion and delirium.)
Yet above all, the green world is a place of healing. It is a world,
Frye says, "where art and nature are one," and this dissolution of rigidly
defined contrarities makes possible the "concord of the discord" one encounters
in the final act of *A Midsummer Night's Dream* -- its "tedious
brief scenes" of "tragical mirth." (This play also exemplifies most
clearly the movement from Athens' patriarchal walls to the moon-lit dream-world
of the forest.)
One final note: though Frye was the first to use "green world" in its
Shakespearean sense, the term is actually borrowed from Keats's poem "Endymion."
It is an interesting appropriation; for the concept most similar to Frye's
"green world" occurs also in Keats, and also as a commentary on Shakespeare.
This is the notion of "negative capability," what Keats also calls "being
in uncertainties." It is the ability possessed by an artist, reader, or
other traveller to negate (hence "negative") the conventional world of
fact and reason, in favor of an enraptured experience of the
unknown. Such an experience can be scary, and so it requires us to
have confidence and find trust in ourselves; we must learn to be "content
with half knowledge." Yet, for Keats, this negatively capable green-world
is the ultimate source of imagination, wonder, and beauty.
I hope at least a couple of you have read down this far. I think it will be interesting to see how -- and if -- these ideas find fruition on Dar's new album.