Four Shakespearean Period Pieces
Margreta de Grazia
Abstract
A curious transvaluation is taking place in our study of the past: negatives are becoming positives and vice versa. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are now being hailed as correctives or alternatives to that order. Conversely, chronology and periods, the mainstays of that order, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent. Secularization, once embraced as the great precipitate of the modern era, is now also on the defensive. In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare Studies continue unshaken? This is the question ... More
A curious transvaluation is taking place in our study of the past: negatives are becoming positives and vice versa. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are now being hailed as correctives or alternatives to that order. Conversely, chronology and periods, the mainstays of that order, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent. Secularization, once embraced as the great precipitate of the modern era, is now also on the defensive. In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare Studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term. The book demonstrates how challenges raised at a conceptual level have thrown into question some of the key tenets and practices of the study of Shakespeare. Each chapter focuses on one of the temporalizing terms: the detection of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project. All four chapters coalesce around a common objective: to show how the emergence of these historical coordinates, long after Shakespeare, affected the editing, staging, and criticism of his plays.
Keywords:
anachronism,
chronology,
periods,
secularization,
Shakespeare Studies,
modernity,
reappraisal
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2021 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226785196 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: January 2022 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226785363.001.0001 |
