Late Shakespeare A New World of Words

by Palfrey, Simon

• ISBN13: 9780198186199
• ISBN10: 0198186193
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-11-06
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Shakespeare's late plays are usually seen in terms of courtliness and escapism. But the critical tradition has been too decorous. Neither neo-Christian pieties nor high-political allegory can account for the works' audacity and surprise, or the popular investment in both their form andmeaning. Post-structuralist and historicist approaches show the indeterminacy and materiality of language, but rarely identify how particular figures (words and characters) capture and energise contested history. Recent criticism tends to put a pre-emptive 'master-paradigm' above all else; a moresinuous, minutely attentive critical vocabulary is needed to apprehend Shakespeare's turbulent, precise, teeming metaphorical discourse. Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words reappraises the origins of authority, language, and decorum, and the prospects for each. Through his portrayal of 'popular' desire---in his rustics, clowns, rogues, slaves, women---Shakespeare presents worlds which explore the meaning of the 'subject', and thepotential for effective transformatory agency. Rather than a Jonsonian (or perhaps earlier Shakespearian) verisimilitude, with each person discrete and verifiable, Shakespeare's characters embody metaphor-in-process; like the revamped romance genre itself, they 'take on' surrounding turbulence. The plays show the stormy consequences of hegemonic violence. The subsequent exile to wilderness allows for contingent novelty: new liberties are tested amid the wreckage or recapitulation of old forms. The plays pit possible sources of regeneration (romantic pastoral, semi-populist humanism)against more primal violence and rebelliousness. Finally, the book argues against a conventional sense of the plays' movement towards divinely sanctioned closure; mischief, irony, polysemy remain; romance's political problems are competitive, multiple, and tumescently unpredictable.

Author Biography

Simon Palfrey is Lecturer in English and the History of Ideas at the University of Melbourne.

Table of Contents

ABBREVIATIONS	xii
Introduction	1	(35)
1. ROMANCE, IRONY, AND HUMANISM	36	(21)
2. PERICLES AND THE IDEA OF THE HERO	57	(22)
3. BODY LANGUAGE AT COURT	79	(34)
4. COUNTRY MATTERS	113	(25)
5. MAGNETIC ISLAND AND ISLANDER IN THE TEMPEST	138	(31)
6. VIOLENCE AND FREEDOM	169	(25)
7. WOMEN AND ROMANCE	194	(36)
8. ENDINGS	230	(37)
BIBLIOGRAPHY	267	(24)
INDEX	291