Shakespeare And The Uses Of Ideology

First published in 1987. The essays in Shakespeare Reproduced offer a political critique of Shakespeare's writings and the uses to which those writings are put Some of the essays focus on Shakespeare in his own time and consider how his plays can be seen to reproduce or subvert the cultural orthodoxies and the power relations of the late Renaissance. Others examine the forces which have produced an overtly political criticism of Shakespeare and of his use in culture. Contributors include: Jean E Howard and Marion O'Connor, Walter Cohen, Don E Wayne, Thomas Cartelli, Peter Erickson, Karen Newman, Thomas Moisan, Michael D Bristol, Thomas Sorge, Jonathan Goldberg, Robert Weimann, Margaret Ferguson.

How do performances of Shakespeare change the meanings of the plays? In this controversial new book, Sarah Werner argues that the text of a Shakespeare play is only one of the many factors that give a performance its meaning. By focusing on The Royal Shakespeare Company, Werner demonstrates how actor training, company management and gender politics fundamentally affect both how a production is created and the interpretations it can suggest. Werner concentrates particularly on: The influential training methods of Cicely Berry and Patsy Rodenburg The history of the RSC Women's Group Gale Edwards' production of The Taming of the Shrew She reveals that no performance of Shakespeare is able to bring the plays to life or to realise the playwright's intentions without shaping them to mirror our own assumptions. By examining the ideological implications of performance practices, this book will help all interested in Shakespeare's plays to explore what it means to study them in performance.

Part One: Theory and Ideology. Part Two: Theory as Academic Practice: Part Three: Censorship and Teaching Practice.

Examines William Shakespeare’s role in American ideology. Utilizing the theoretical approaches of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, adaptation and appropriation theories, and Critical Race Theory, the author argues that Shakespeare is an integral part of American history and culture by how his works factor into American ideologies, particularly within ideologies focusing on race and colonialism. Specific plays and Shakespeare’s texts are analyzed, the author also follows the literary history of Americans in response to these plays. The first chapter looks at the Revolutionary and early republic eras, with particular focus on John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, and their analyses of Shakespeare’s works. The second chapter highlights the Civil War era, and the Confederate sympathizer Mary Preston’s analyses of some of Shakespeare’s plays. The third chapter looks at how Shakespeare’s plays, particularly Julius Caesar, may have factored into President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. The final chapter analyzes the early twentieth century, and how Shakespeare was used to push both racist and progressive ideologies. The conclusion looks at how Shakespeare and the Humanities are relevant in America in the twenty-first century. The conclusion of the thesis is that authoritative power, whether that be in government, or in the perception of the author, must always be challenged if society is to progress.

This book provides a bridge between Shakespeare Studies and classical social theory, opening up readings of Shakespeare to a new audience outside of literary studies and the humanities. Shakespeare has long been known as a 'great thinker' and this book reads his plays through the lens of an anthropologist, revealing new connections between Shakespeare's plays and the lives we now lead. Close readings of a selection of frequently studied plays - Hamlet, The Winter's Tale, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar and King Lear - engage with the plays in detail while connecting them with some of the biggest questions we all ask ourselves, about love, friendship, ritual, language, human interactions and the world around us. The plays are examined through various social theories including performance theory, cognitive theory, semiotics, exchange theory and structuralism. The book concludes with a consideration of how "the new astronomy" of his day and developments in optics changed the very idea of "perspective," and shaped Shakespeare's approach to embedding social theory in his dramatic texts. This accessible and engaging book will appeal to those approaching Shakespeare from outside literary studies, but will also be valuable to literature students approaching Shakespeare for the first time, or looking for a new angle on the plays.

What were Shakespeare's politics? As this study demonstrates, contained in Shakespeare's plays is an astonishingly powerful reckoning with the tradition of Western political thought, one whose depth and scope places Shakespeare alongside Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes and others. This book is the first attempt by a political theorist to read Shakespeare within the trajectory of political thought as one of the authors of modernity. From Shakespeare's interpretation of ancient and medieval politics to his wrestling with issues of legitimacy, religious toleration, family conflict, and economic change, Alex Schulman shows how Shakespeare produces a fascinating map of modern politics at its crisis-filled birth. As a result, there are brand new readings of Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Richard II and Henry IV, parts I and II , The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure.

Fredric Jameson takes on the allegorical form Works do not have meanings, they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal investments (including the political kind). It is a process that sorts incommensurabilities and registers contradictions (which is not the same as solving them!) The inevitable and welcome conflict of interpretations - a discursive, ideological struggle - therefore needs to be supplemented by an account of this simultaneous processing of multiple meanings, rather than an abandonment to liberal pluralisms and tolerant (or intolerant) relativisms. This is not a book about "method", but it does propose a dialectic capable of holding together in one breath the heterogeneities that reflect our biological individualities, our submersion in collective history and class struggle, and our alienation to a disembodied new world of information and abstraction. Eschewing the arid secularities of philosophy, Walter Benjamin once recommended the alternative of the rich figurality of an older theology; in that spirit we here return to the antiquated Ptolemaic systems of ancient allegory and its multiple levels (a proposal first sketched out in The Political Unconscious); it is tested against the epic complexities of the overtly allegorical works of Dante, Spenser and the Goethe of Faust II, as well as symphonic form in music, and the structure of the novel, postmodern as well as Third-World: about which a notorious essay on National Allegory is here reprinted with a theoretical commentary; and an allegorical history of emotion is meanwhile rehearsed from its contemporary, geopolitical context.