To "rematerialize" in the sense of Rematerializing Shakespeare is not to recover a lost material infrastructure, as Marx spoke of, nor is it to restore to some material existence its priority over the imaginary. This anthology of work by three generations of some of the most highly-regarded British and American Shakespeare scholars does not offer a single theoretical stance on any of the forms of critical materialism (Marxism, cultural materialism, new historicism, transversal poetics, gender studies or performance criticism), but rather demonstrates that the materiality of Shakespeare is multidimensional and consists of the imagination, the intended, and the desired. Nothing returns in this rematerialization, unless it is a return in the sense of the repressed, which, when it comes back, comes back as something else. The essays assembled here constitute an emergent activity of Shakespeare studies that focuses not just on the past or present, but also on the critical future. An all-star line-up of contributors includes Kate McLuskie, Terence Hawkes, Catherine Belsey and Doug Bruster.
'Robert Weimann is a pre-eminent scholar of the Elizabethan theatre and early modern performance culture, whose brilliant critical work on Shakespeare and his contemporaries has been profoundly influential. Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage is both a worthy tribute to Weimann's seminal work and an impressive demonstration of the variety and fruitfulness of its influence. Reimagining Shakespeare is a stimulating collaborative contribution to our understanding and appreciation of the dramatic art and the cultural work of the Shakespearean theatre.' - Professor Louis Montrose, University of California, San Diego, USA
'Dedicated to Robert Weimann, Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage at once extends Weimann's materialist critique of the practices of early modern authorship, acting, and theatricality, and explores his celebrated bifold articulation of authority and representation. Reimagining Shakespeare provocatively rematerializes the original impact that Shakespeare - and Weimann - have had on contemporary critical culture.' - W. B. Worthen, University of California, Berkeley, USA
'This energetic and highly original collection of essays reveals the continuing power of Robert Weimann's thought for contemporary studies of the early modern stage. Incisively building on Weimann's attention to the multiple sources of authority that energize the production of Shakespeare on the page and the stage, the critics assembled in this volume focus on the local conditions that allow his works to be continually remade in the theater, on the printed page, and even in the popular parodies of BBC radio comedy. This is a magnificent volume and a fitting tribute to one of the most important Shakespeare critics of the twentieth-century.' - Professor Jean Howard, University of Columbia, USA
'Rematerializing Shakespeare is a superb collection of essays by twelve distinguished scholars exploring the rich materiality of Shakespeare' plays. Provoked by, engaged with, and dedicated to Robert Weimann, the essays offer compelling testimony to Weimann's profound impact upon the
study of Early Modern English Drama and, in their own terms, reveal often unexpected sources of value and coherence in Shakespeare's plays, even as they offer an implicit challenge to many of the assumptions of the discipline of literary studies as it exists today.' - David Scott Kastan, Columbia University, USA
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Shakespearean Emergences: Back from Materialisms to Transversalisms and Beyond; B.Reynolds & W.N.West
PART I: THE FORM AND PRESSURE OF THE TIME: POPULAR AND UNPOPULAR TRADITIONS
'Strike All That Look Upon With Marvel': Theatrical and Theological Wonder in The Winter's Tale; H.Diehl
Performance and Urban Space in Shakespeare's Rome, or, 'S.P.Q.L'; D.J.Hopkins
Shakespeare's Little Boys: Theatrical Apprenticeship and the Construction of Childhood; C.Belsey
PART II: WHAT'S THE MATTER? REVISIONS AND REVERSIONS IN PEN AND VOICE
Rematerializing Shakespeare's Intertheatricality: The Occidental/Oriental Halimpsest; J.Gil Harris
The Politics of Shakespeare's Prose; D.Bruster
Mercutio's Bad Language; W.N.West
Nanti Everything; T.Hawkes
Authority and Early Modern Theater: Representing Robert Weimann; J.Drakakis
PART III: CREATURES SITTING AT A PLAY: THE AUTHORITY AND REPRESENTATION OF AUDIENCES
Homo Clausus at the Theater; D.Hillman
Figuring the Consumer: the Cultural Production of Early Modern Theatre; K.McLuskie
The Delusion of Critique: Subjunctive Space, Transversality, and the Conceit of Deceit in Hamlet; A.Kubiak & B.Reynolds
Index
BRYAN REYNOLDS is Professor and Head of Doctoral Studies in the Department of Drama at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He is author of Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2003), Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002), and co-editor of Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (2000).
WILLIAM N. WEST is Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University, USA. He has taught previously at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Stanford University, the Universities of California at Berkeley and Nevada at Reno. He has published Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and edited, with Helen Higbee, Robert Weimann's Actor's Pen and Author's Voice (Cambridge University Press, 2000). West is currently at work on a book on the uses of confusion in the English drama of the 1580s and 1590s.
Description
To "rematerialize" in the sense of Rematerializing Shakespeare is not to recover a lost material infrastructure, as Marx spoke of, nor is it to restore to some material existence its priority over the imaginary. This anthology of work by three generations of some of the most highly-regarded British and American Shakespeare scholars does not offer a single theoretical stance on any of the forms of critical materialism (Marxism, cultural materialism, new historicism, transversal poetics, gender studies or performance criticism), but rather demonstrates that the materiality of Shakespeare is multidimensional and consists of the imagination, the intended, and the desired. Nothing returns in this rematerialization, unless it is a return in the sense of the repressed, which, when it comes back, comes back as something else. The essays assembled here constitute an emergent activity of Shakespeare studies that focuses not just on the past or present, but also on the critical future. An all-star line-up of contributors includes Kate McLuskie, Terence Hawkes, Catherine Belsey and Doug Bruster.
Reviews
'Robert Weimann is a pre-eminent scholar of the Elizabethan theatre and early modern performance culture, whose brilliant critical work on Shakespeare and his contemporaries has been profoundly influential. Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage is both a worthy tribute to Weimann's seminal work and an impressive demonstration of the variety and fruitfulness of its influence. Reimagining Shakespeare is a stimulating collaborative contribution to our understanding and appreciation of the dramatic art and the cultural work of the Shakespearean theatre.' - Professor Louis Montrose, University of California, San Diego, USA
'Dedicated to Robert Weimann, Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage at once extends Weimann's materialist critique of the practices of early modern authorship, acting, and theatricality, and explores his celebrated bifold articulation of authority and representation. Reimagining Shakespeare provocatively rematerializes the original impact that Shakespeare - and Weimann - have had on contemporary critical culture.' - W. B. Worthen, University of California, Berkeley, USA
'This energetic and highly original collection of essays reveals the continuing power of Robert Weimann's thought for contemporary studies of the early modern stage. Incisively building on Weimann's attention to the multiple sources of authority that energize the production of Shakespeare on the page and the stage, the critics assembled in this volume focus on the local conditions that allow his works to be continually remade in the theater, on the printed page, and even in the popular parodies of BBC radio comedy. This is a magnificent volume and a fitting tribute to one of the most important Shakespeare critics of the twentieth-century.' - Professor Jean Howard, University of Columbia, USA
'Rematerializing Shakespeare is a superb collection of essays by twelve distinguished scholars exploring the rich materiality of Shakespeare' plays. Provoked by, engaged with, and dedicated to Robert Weimann, the essays offer compelling testimony to Weimann's profound impact upon the
study of Early Modern English Drama and, in their own terms, reveal often unexpected sources of value and coherence in Shakespeare's plays, even as they offer an implicit challenge to many of the assumptions of the discipline of literary studies as it exists today.' - David Scott Kastan, Columbia University, USA
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Shakespearean Emergences: Back from Materialisms to Transversalisms and Beyond; B.Reynolds & W.N.West
PART I: THE FORM AND PRESSURE OF THE TIME: POPULAR AND UNPOPULAR TRADITIONS
'Strike All That Look Upon With Marvel': Theatrical and Theological Wonder in The Winter's Tale; H.Diehl
Performance and Urban Space in Shakespeare's Rome, or, 'S.P.Q.L'; D.J.Hopkins
Shakespeare's Little Boys: Theatrical Apprenticeship and the Construction of Childhood; C.Belsey
PART II: WHAT'S THE MATTER? REVISIONS AND REVERSIONS IN PEN AND VOICE
Rematerializing Shakespeare's Intertheatricality: The Occidental/Oriental Halimpsest; J.Gil Harris
The Politics of Shakespeare's Prose; D.Bruster
Mercutio's Bad Language; W.N.West
Nanti Everything; T.Hawkes
Authority and Early Modern Theater: Representing Robert Weimann; J.Drakakis
PART III: CREATURES SITTING AT A PLAY: THE AUTHORITY AND REPRESENTATION OF AUDIENCES
Homo Clausus at the Theater; D.Hillman
Figuring the Consumer: the Cultural Production of Early Modern Theatre; K.McLuskie
The Delusion of Critique: Subjunctive Space, Transversality, and the Conceit of Deceit in Hamlet; A.Kubiak & B.Reynolds
Index
Authors
BRYAN REYNOLDS is Professor and Head of Doctoral Studies in the Department of Drama at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He is author of Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2003), Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002), and co-editor of Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (2000).
WILLIAM N. WEST is Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University, USA. He has taught previously at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Stanford University, the Universities of California at Berkeley and Nevada at Reno. He has published Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and edited, with Helen Higbee, Robert Weimann's Actor's Pen and Author's Voice (Cambridge University Press, 2000). West is currently at work on a book on the uses of confusion in the English drama of the 1580s and 1590s.
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