"Between Platonism and Aristolelism: Thomas Hardy’s "The Dynasts”"

As a twentieth-century poet, Thomas Hardy is the author of a most ambitious project which has been published over a span of five years (1903-1908) entitled The Dynasts, an Epic-Drama of the War with Napoleon in Three Parts, Nineteen Acts and One Hundred and Thirty Scenes. Conceived as a long epic poem rather than a work that could be conventionally staged in the theatre, the trilogy is essentially the record of the Napoleonic wars from March 1805 to the battle of Waterloo in 1815. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how, even within his own conception of the universe, Hardy revisits Plato’s paradigm for hermeneutical purposes. In particular, Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology are re-elaborated in order to fit Hardy’s view of the “Immanent Will”, as well as to characterize the figure of Napoleon as the visible image deriving from the Intelligible Form. Hardy’s presentation of Napoleon in terms of the two contrasting visions co-existing in his mind – the individual as the centre of his own world and as an insignificant entity in the scientific dimensions of space and time – testifies to his effort to dramatize the close relationship between the phenomenal world and the Overworld.