Abstract
Character has made a comeback. Having all but disappeared from Shakespeare criticism as an analytic category in the second half of the twentieth century, the idea of character has now begun to reemerge as an important—perhaps even an essential—way of thinking about the political, ethical, historical, literary, and performative aspects of early modern theater. The present volume recognizes the development in Shakespeare studies of what might best be termed a “new character criticism,” by bringing together of a group of scholars whose work touches in one way or another on the fundamental question: what is character? That these scholars approach the question from a wide variety of perspectives and with disparate methodological tools suggests how valuable their answers might be to an increasingly interdisciplinary study of Shakespeare’s plays.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Anna Murphy Jameson, Shakespeare’s Heroines (1832), ed. Cheri L. Larsen Hoeckley. (Broadview, 2005), 55.
The practice of “character assassination” was particularly popular several decades ago. Among the most influential works were Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (New York: Methuen 1984)
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)
Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Routledge, 1985). More recent work has prosecuted the case against character with greater theoretical sophistication, interpretive nuance, and historical depth.
See especially Margreta de GraziaHamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Jonathan Goldberg, “Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 118–19.
Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds Margaret Ferguson et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123–42, at 141.
Katharine Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
Theodore B. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
Leonard Digges, “Poets are borne not made,” in Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1972.
The phrase “double-voiced” is from M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 324.
Henry Jackson, [Othello at Oxford, 1610], quoted and translated in Riverside Shakespeare, 1978.
For a discussion of the person as the measure of meaning-making in Shakespeare, see Paul Yachnin, “Personations: The Taming of the Shrew and the Limits of Theoretical Criticism,” Early Modern Literary Studies 2.1 (1996): 2.1–31 <URL: http://purl.ocic.org/emis/02–1/yachshak.html>.
Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 26.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2009 Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Yachnin, P., Slights, J. (2009). Introduction. In: Yachnin, P., Slights, J. (eds) Shakespeare and Character. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584150_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584150_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36439-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-58415-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)