Shakespeare, Crossing the Rubicon

Summary

What are historical representations representations of?

To paraphrase Hayden White, what are dramatic characters characterizations of? More specifically, how does the process of converting narrative material into dramatic form affect the shape and design, even the very concept, of character? The idea of character has fallen out of favour in the past two decades, as critics have instead pondered the birth and fashioning of subjectivity, in terms derived from Foucault and Lacan. Yet the lines demarcating the ideologically constructed, divided, and never selfauthorizing subject from the authorially constructed, conflicted, and never self-actualizing character have often seemed to be unclear, and their deployment more useful to the project of directing attention past the sovereign author than to that of understanding the complicated status of dramatized beings. Indeed, a critical era attuned to social constructionism has sometimes blurred the distinction between historical subjects, shaped by colliding ideological forces, and dramatic characters, subject on several dimensions to the same forces yet fundamentally different because of being the product of a dramatist's mind and an actor's embodiment.

In this essay I engage these issues by returning to the old question of Shakespeare's relation to the Plutarchan texts recognized as the primary sources of his Roman plays. Although Geoffrey Bullough's claim that source study presents a 'way open to us of watching Shakespeare the craftsman in his workshop' depends on notions of textual and authorial autonomy that would be difficult to support in our intertextual world, the basic recognition - that something important is happening in the passage between a clearly identified source and a later text - remains indisputable