Shakespeare After Theory

Kastan, David Scott

doi:10.4324/9780203901656

Cited by 22 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…Shakespeare’s construction of political scenarios and problems are not limited to orthodox expressions: instead, he regularly admits radical ideas, from the peasant egalitarianism of Cade’s rebels to Falstaff’s iconoclastic materialism to Lear’s epiphany about the suffering of the poor and the Christian duty owed to them. David Scott Kastan argues that Shakespeare’s histories show that “the pageantry and props of rule” are “strategic rather than sacramental” and that the plays “expose the idealizations of political power by presenting rule as role” (121). Of course, Stephen Greenblatt’s early work argued that such subversion and opposition was “contained”– that is, the rehearsal of radical ideas merely affirmed with all the more strength the Elizabethan regime (30).…”

Section: The Theater As a Space Of Popular Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shakespeare and Popular Politics

Doty

2013

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This article defines popular politics as the tactics -ranging from grumbling to rioting -used by common people to articulate and redress economic and social injustice. Early modern popular politics were not, however, exclusively radical and were rarely antimonarchical. A study of popular politics thus pressures the conservative versus progressive binary through which most critics discuss Shakespeare's politics. Furthermore, this article contests the widely held assumption that Shakespeare was hostile in his representations of 'the people' and toward his audience. An understanding of popular politics equips one to read Shakespeare's crowds not as irrational lovers of violence but rather as stewards of the commonwealth or conscious agents of their own material interests. This article poses the theater itself as a space of popular politics, insofar as it was a space where popular politics were depicted onstage and where common people were invited to think through political issues.

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Section: The Theater As a Space Of Popular Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shakespeare and Popular Politics

Doty

2013

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“…This moment was marked by the publication of David Kastan's Shakespeare after Theory published in 1999 and followed up by a plethora of new works that came to be called 'the new materialism' or 'new new historicism'. 10 What they had in common was an abandonment of the earlier theoretical approaches and a single-focus attention to the past as past, bracketing any issues of early modern literature's relevance to our times. While some of these productions were insightful and interesting, the development on the whole seemed to Hawkes, as it did to me and a large number of others, a wholesale retreat from what had made the rise of new historicism and cultural materialism so exciting.…”

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confidence: 97%

Terence Hawkes and Presentism

Grady¹

2014

Critical Survey

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Terence Hawkes was an eminent Shakespearean and critical theorist whose career had many facets. He was also a friend and mentor to me, a man who throughout his career countered the class privilege and arbitrary power he had experienced himself at the beginning of his career and which he fought when he saw it at work against others. While his critical work developed over the years in different stages -from humanism to structuralism to poststructuralism to presentism -there were certain constants in all of them: an awareness of language as such, of the power of the critic's present in all readings of works of the past, and of the political and social dimensions of literature and literary criticism. The two of us collaborated in the promulgation of the idea of critical presentism in our 2007 anthology Presentist Shakespeares, but Terence Hawkes' presentist practice can be traced back into some of his earlier works composed well before the term was coined. His 1986 That Shakespeherian Rag can be seen as the beginning of both his pioneering work in deconstructive criticism and in ideas and practices that marked the presentism of his last several books and articles.There are many different ways one could attempt to sum up the life and achievements of Terence Hawkes: he had a distinguished academic career as an influential critic, editor, series editor, and international lecturer; he was a pioneer in Shakespeare studies in several ways and in different eras -notably as one of the first to bring structuralism to English and then as a very early recogniser of key post-structuralist ideas in his milestone essay on Hamlet, 'Telmah'; and, as we will see, a key developer of critical presentism. In addition he was a dedicated teacher and colleague and a generous mentor and friend to many, many of us in the course of his career. I certainly have

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“…“The book,” wrote David Scott Kastan in his 2001 study Shakespeare and the Book , “is a hot topic in the academy today … For too long, however, its consideration has been shunted off to unpopular bibliography courses or hidden among the offerings of the library school.” While books had a long‐held monopoly on writing, Kastan observed, the book itself had been almost invisible in the recent history of academic criticism. “Belatedly we have come to see it in its own right — as an artifact, as a commodity, and as a technology” (1).…”

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“…When Shakespeare and the Book first appeared, it seemed neatly to encapsulate the methodological insights of a subfield of Shakespeare scholarship that had been growing since Robert Darnton broached the question “What is the History of Books?” in 1982. Now, fifteen years after its publication, Kastan's study seems rather to have marked the end of a first wave of Shakespearean book history, one dominated by the poststructuralist critique of authorship and textual self‐identity that flourished in English departments through the 1990s . That body of work, often under the banner of a turn to “materiality,” focused on texts as they were realized at the moment of production and thus joined an older dialogue about origins stretching back to the anti‐intentionalism of the New Critics, the printing‐house forensics of the New Bibliographers, the nativism of late‐Victorian philology, and beyond.…”

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Economies of Scale: Shakespeare and Book History

Knight

2017

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The purpose of the present article is to survey recent developments in Shakespeare and book history and to identify promising new avenues in the field. Book history always had a close – if never precisely articulated – relationship with New Historicism, but in recent years, I argue, as the influence of the latter has waned in English studies, book history has become a crucible of alternative historicisms in part because it is the subfield that deals most immediately and reflexively with the status of texts as historical evidence. Perhaps paradoxically, I also suggest, book history is by its nature a demilitarized zone, protected from the extremes of presentism and pastism, aestheticism and contextualism, critique and affective attachment, while freer than many subfields to absorb what is best in these conflicting intellectual campaigns. I organize my account in three section headings that reflect what I see as the prevailing currents in Shakespeare and book history at present: the plurality of context, reading at scale, and beyond materiality.

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Shakespeare After Theory

Cited by 22 publications

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Shakespeare and Popular Politics

Shakespeare and Popular Politics

Terence Hawkes and Presentism

Economies of Scale: Shakespeare and Book History

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