Re(-)fusing the Sign: Linguistic Ambiguity and the Subversion of Patriarchy in Romeo and Juliet and The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Abstract

Thus begins Terence Hawkes’s irreverent and incisive book, one of the first examinations of the cultural construction of the Shakespearean canon, That Shakespeherian Rag — a title adroitly culled from the name of a twenties jazz song that appears in Eliot’s The Waste Land. ² Towards the end of his book, Hawkes draws a parallel between the activities of the poststructuralist critic and the jazz musician:

what I propose [is] the sense of a text as a site, or an area of conflicting and often contradictory potential interpretations, no one or group of which can claim ‘intrinsic’ primacy or ‘inherent’ authority …