2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage

Summary

Reactions against the term ‘early modern’ to describe the times in which Shakespeare wrote are gathering momentum. In spite of its title, The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World aims to prioritize continuities between Renaissance and medieval culture rather than ‘early modern intellectual history and modern humanism’ (p. 12). In Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, Margreta de Grazia offers an ‘anti-Early Modern’ (p. 21) reading of King Lear, remarking that it is dangerous to focus exclusively on the Renaissance as the nascence of the modern and to make Shakespeare, if not our contemporary, then an early version of ourselves. De Grazia’s fine analysis shows that such an approach does not mean abandoning the theoretical sophistication which has characterized so much recent work on the ‘early modern’.

Richard Hillman takes an equally theoretically inspired 'backwards' look in Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modem English Drama, an exciting study of subjectivity on stage, using key aspects of Lacan. Proposing a 'middle ground' between the extremes of historicist and humanist ideas of selfhood, Hillman traces a dramatic history of inwardness which stretches back to the medieval tradition. The mirror and the book serve as key representations of Lacanian models of selfhood, and theoretical positions are usefully signposted throughout. God, conscience and the slippery medium of language are all fundamental to the constitution of the fragile speaking subject, Hillman argues, but at the very moment of self-speaking on stage, subjectivity is threatened by aphanisis, a tendency to face away.