Abstract
Neo-Elizabethanism, the school of Shakespeare criticism discussed in this chapter, continues and intensifies trends already apparent in the modernist focus on the educated few among Shakespeare’s first audience. For Wilson, Knights or Greg, the intellectual prowess and aesthetic sophistication of elite theatregoers are seen as a necessary precondition for the complexity of Shakespeare’s plays. While Neo-Elizabethanism does not regard Shakespeare’s plays primarily as verbal artefacts, but rather as historical documents in the widest possible sense of the term, the nexus it posits between the audience on the one hand and the plays on the other is possibly even closer. The meaning of Shakespeare’s plays is seen as largely, sometimes even totally determined by the historical context in which they were written. That context, in turn, is embodied by the Elizabethan audience, who thus offers a privileged, if not in fact the only gateway to what a given play ‘really’ means.
Keywords
Historical Document Intended Audience Literary Tradition Historical Situation Contemporary HistoryPreview
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Notes
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