Abstract
In today’s age of global cultural mobility, marked by widespread hybridization and an incessant flux of ideas, knowledge, goods and finances, ‘Shakespeare’ provides a truly paradigmatic case of a matrix that has operated across different historical and national contexts as a crucial factor shaping people’s ways of experiencing, conceptualizing and (re-)imagining reality. This pliancy has resulted moreover in the rise of transcultural critical, theatrical or editorial practices that have further enhanced Shakespeare’s versatility, the readiness of his works to give voice to an exceptionally broad range of historical and cultural issues that are alien to the context in which they were originally produced. As brilliantly remarked by Terence Hawkes in the early 1990s, we keep ‘meaning by Shakespeare’.1 Hawkes’s observation rested on the assumption that there is no intrinsic meaning to a text, but rather a certain range of meanings, that signification is a process which is essentially based on the agency of readers/critics whose interpretative skills are moulded by the culture and the historical context in which they operate, and whose meaning-making process invests all the texts belonging to each specific literary system.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992). According to Bate, ‘The history of appropriation may suggest that “Shakespeare” was not a man who lived from 1564 to 1616 but a body of work that is refashioned by each subsequent age in the image of itself.’
See Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 3.
Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943).
See Marion Bodwell Smith, Dualities in Shakespeare (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1966);
Rosalie L. Coolie, Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966);
Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967).
Robert Grudin, Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1979).
The same direction was subsequently taken by Colin N. Manlove in The Gap in Shakespeare: The Motif of Division from Richard II to The Tempest (London: Vision, 1981) and, a few years later, by
Stanley C. Boorman in Human Conflict in Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).
Jennifer A. Bates, Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).
Particularly representative of this approach, on Italian ground, are the following major critical studies: Fernando Ferrara, Shakespeare e la commedia (Bari: Adriatica, 1964);
Paola Pugliatti, I segni latenti (Messina: D’Anna, 1976), particularly the part on the structuring of King Lear;
Marcello Pagnini, Il paradigma della specularità (Pisa: Pacini, 1976), with specific reference to his reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the Italian semiologist puts forth an interpretation of specularity in terms of binary structures both in the formal and in the semantic dimension, in a synchronic and contextual reading which constantly connects the play’s formal qualities to its episteme.
G. Wilson Knight, This Sceptred Isle: Shakespeare’s Message for England at War, (Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1980), 5.
Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (eds), Shakespeare in the World of Communism and Socialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006);
Tina Krontiris, ‘Shakespeare and Censorship during the Second World War: Othello in Occupied Greece’, in Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, Identity, ed. by Irena R. Makaryk and Marissa McHugh (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Zoltán Markus (Vassar College, NY) is currently engaged in a research project entitled ‘Shakespeares at War: Cultural Appropriations of Shakespeare in London and Berlin during World War II’.
David Greig, Dunsinane (London: Faber, 2010).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Carla Dente
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dente, C. (2013). Introduction. In: Dente, C., Soncini, S. (eds) Shakespeare and Conflict. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311344_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311344_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34463-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31134-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)