Abstract
Beginning in the early 1990s, a materialism that neither Karl Marx nor Fredric Jameson would be likely to recognize achieved an important place in early modern studies. Indeed, I call this a “new” materialism not only because of its momentum as a critical genre but because it comes as a disciplinary answer to a question that the epigraph asks us to ask: What future can materialist criticism of early modern texts have after Marx? I mean the “after” in this sentence to be attached not to Karl Marx or even to the literary criticism that followed in the wake of his theories. By “after,” instead, I mean after a constellation of events during the late twentieth century that worked to lessen the attraction of materialist political theory, events familiar to anyone who has read the newspaper during the past several decades.
Today Marxist (and other radical) approaches to Shakespeare are staged by what we may call Reaganite and Thatcherite literary criticism as a kind of cultural Soviet Union, whose collapse is evident to everybody. Conservatives thus need not argue their case, but take it for granted; while by the same token the Left must offer theirs on both levels at once, as the defence of new local interpretations which is at one and the same time a whole social and cultural programme, a whole new defence of the radical agenda as such.
—Fredric Jameson, “Radicalizing Radical Shakespeare”1
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Notes
Fredric Jameson, “Radicalizing Radical Shakespeare: The Permanent Revolution in Shakespeare Studies,” in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps (London: Verso, 1995), 320–28; at 323.
Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, “Introduction: Marxism now; Shakespeare now,” in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Howard and Shershow (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–15; at 15.
See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), where he quotes or alludes to, variously, 1 Henry TV (54), Much Ado About Nothing (87), Timon of Athens (132), and The Merchant of Venice (272, 457); and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 170, where he paraphrases Hamlet. On Marx’s use of Shakespeare,
see Johanna Rudolph, “Karl Marx und Shakespere,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (East) 105 (1969): 25–53;
and Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers (New York: Methuen, 1987), 195–96 n. 89.
Karl Kautsky, Thomas More und seine Utopie (Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz, 1888); published in English as Thomas More and His Utopia, trans. H. J. Stenning (New York: International Publishers, 1927).
Robert Weimann, Drama und Wirklichkeit in der Shakespearezeit: ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Elisabethanischen Theaters (Halle: VEB Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1958).
Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
See, for an example of such work, Michael Bristol’s Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen, 1985).
John Drakakis, “Discourse and Authority: The Renaissance of Robert Weimann,” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 83–104; 84.
See Weimann , Shakespeare und die Tradition des Volkstheaters : Soziologie, Dramaturgie, Gestaltung (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1967).
Arnold Kettle, ed., Shakespeare in a Changing World (New York: International Publishers, 1964).
L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937).
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 103, 136, 148; quotation at 136.
Paul Delany, “King Lear and the Decline of Feudalism,” PMLA 92 (1977): 429–40;
Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990);
Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);
and Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Postmodernist Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985);
John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985).
Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, eds., Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 3.
Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from “Utopia” to “The Tempest” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992);
Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994),
and Orlin , ed., Elizabethan Households: An Anthology (Washington, DC: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995);
Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1997);
and Orlin , ed., Material London, ca. 1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000);
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
and Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
Jonathan Gil Harris, “The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects,” European Journal of English Studies 4.3 (2000): 111–123; at 111.
Henry S. Turner, “Nashe’s Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599),” ELH 68.3 (2001): 529–61; at 530.
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© 2003 Douglas Bruster
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Bruster, D. (2003). The New Materialism in Early Modern Studies. In: Shakespeare and the Question of Culture. Early Modern Cultural Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05156-1_8
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