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Shakespeare Studies in the XX century

a) General outline

Early 20th-century approaches to Shakespeare were mainly characterized by comparative literary and dramatic studies; increasing attention to language and style; and a renewed recognition of the importance of stage history.

 

In the later 20th century the tradition of exceptional individual critics (often creative writers themselves) bringing their own literary gifts to the exposition of Shakespeare has partly been supplanted by ideologically influenced 'schools' and theories, often collaboratively and collectively reflecting the relatively new academic disciplines of politics, psychology, sociology, and cultural and women's studies. Of course, there continue to be many notable exceptions (including perhaps T. S. Eliot, Dover Wilson, Wilson Knight, Muriel Bradbrook, William Empson, and, more recently, writers such as Harold Bloom and Ted Hughes), in whom individual perception and even personality seem to play almost as large a part in their criticism as specialized knowledge and systematic methodology. In many respects these, and others, seem to represent what has lately been characterized and caricatured as an eclectic tradition of 'liberal humanism', bearing connotations both positive (in its elevation of individual perceptions and values) and negative (as neglecting social, historical, and political factors).

 

A philosophical division has even revived between those who accept the mimetic status of art in reflecting some kind of external reality, and those for whom the only reality is subjective and perceptual. In the contested area of ideology, the socio-economic theories of Karl Marx and the psycho-sexual theories of Sigmund Freud have been widely applied. Carl Jung's formulation of a 'collective unconscious', occupied by universally recognized 'symbolic archetypes', has also found adherents.

 

In the past 25 years, traditional modes of exposition have continued to exist alongside sometimes mutually exclusive competing theories. Among these have flourished structuralism; deconstruction; cultural materialism; new historicism; and feminism. All have received wide professional endorsement, but probably only feminist criticism has achieved the full assent of a general non-academic audience.

b) Feminist criticism of Shakespeare

Women's critical engagements with Shakespeare date from Margaret Cavendish's discussion of his plays in her Sociable Letters (1664), and have taken many forms, embracing fiction and performance as well as literary scholarship and criticism. Such engagements have often been motivated by a desire to defend or praise Shakespeare's female characters which can be described as broadly feminist. When a feminist perspective on Shakespeare began to emerge within academic literary criticism in the 1970s, it was initially informed by a similar approach. This was counterbalanced, though, by a more challenging critique of Shakespearian constructions of femininity, which argued that by underwriting certain versions of womanhood with the power of the bard, they had a pernicious cultural effect. In subsequent decades, feminist Shakespeare criticism has flourished and diversified. Committed to making connections between the critic's cultural moment and the Renaissance, feminist criticism of Shakespeare seeks both to intervene in contemporary cultural politics and to recover a fuller sense of the sexual politics of the literary heritage. If its primary effect has been to elicit fresh interpretations of the texts and their original historical location, it is also changing the way that Shakespeare is reproduced and consumed in education and in popular culture.



 

c) New historicism

This term was coined by the American critic Stephen Greenblatt to describe his own and related approaches to the study of literature (superseding Greenblatt's earlier coinage, 'cultural poetics'). It emphasizes contextualizing a work of literature within its larger milieu, and studying both the meaning and the function of the work as an element in a larger matrix of social power.

 

Most characteristically, new historicists like to take an apparently unrelated minor text or historical anecdote from the Elizabethan period and prove that it exemplifies the same dominant ideologies they find informing Shakespeare's texts.

 

In its most characteristic forms in Shakespeare studies, the new historicism has drawn on elements of Marxism, the social theory of Michel Foucault, the anthropological theory and methods of Clifford Geertz, and a wide array of contemporary social theorists. It has taken as a particular polemical opponent previous 'aestheticist' approaches to literature epitomized for new historicists by New Critics and Northrop Frye.

 

Perhaps the earliest identifiable new historical work was Stephen Orgel's The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (1975), but its coming to the forefront of Renaissance studies was marked by the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980).

 

Other prominent new historicists in Shakespeare and early modern studies include Jonathan Goldberg, Catherine Gallagher, Louis Montrose, Leah Marcus, and Leonard Tennenhouse. The new historicism has clear intellectual affiliations with British cultural materialism, but a number of different emphases and practices: rather than emphasizing the possibility of dissent, it has characteristically argued that any instances of apparently 'subversive' ideas in Shakespeare are always already contained, serving only to prove the dominance and necessity of the status quo.

 

d) Cultural materialism

This phrase was originally coined by English critic Raymond Williams {Marxism and Literature, 1977) to describe his own unique contribution to Marxist cultural theory. The meaning of the term was subsequently extended in the 1980s in Shakespeare (and more broadly cultural ) studies to include not only Williams's work but newer currents of Althusserian Marxism, French poststructuralism, and aspects of feminist and postcolonialist theory.

 

Cultural materialism has developed particularly as an explicitly leftist reaction to the 'old' historicism of E. M. W. Tillyard and to Tillyard's more social-minded 'humanist' nemesis F. R. Leavis and his numerous disciples.

 

The term is most often identified in Shakespeare studies with Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, editors of the influential 1985 Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism—the work most responsible for disseminating the term in Shakespeare studies. But it has been applied to a broad range of (mostly British) Marxist and poststructuralist-influenced critics such as Catherine Belsey, Francis Barker, Terence Hawkes, Lisa Jardine, and John Drakakis. Cultural materialism is closely allied to the 'cultural poetics' or 'new historicism' developed contemporaneously in the USA by Stephen Greenblatt and allied critics but has tended to be more explicitly Marxist and politically optimistic than its American variant.


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1054


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