By Hugh Grady
This in-depth selection of essays strains the altering reception of Shakespeare during the last 400 years, within which time Shakespeare has variously been obvious because the final nice exponent of pre-modern Western tradition, a vital inaugurator of modernity, and a prophet of postmodernity. This clean examine Shakespeare's performs is a crucial contribution to the revival of the assumption of 'modernity' and the way we periodise ourselves, and Shakespeare, at the start of a brand new millennium.
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Additional resources for Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium (Accents on Shakespeare)
Example text
Portia’s device is, of course, successful, and having extracted from Bassanio the assurance she requires for their happy future together (conventionally understood as a promise to value the bonds of marriage over those of both male friendship and finance) she reveals her imposture and retracts the threat of cuckoldry. If Portia’s use of disguise brings her power in the marital realm, however, it does so by containing her within it, and within an essentialized femininity that can be temporarily disguised but ultimately not repudiated.
At the same time, the movement from dynastic to companionate marriage, connected on a lower economic level with changes in the labor force that helped transform the family from an economic to an affective unit, further distanced women from the political and economic realms (Belsey 1985a: 167–77). These material circumstances were in turn reflected in and reinforced by the emerging ideology of modern subjectivity: if traditional social and economic roles were sloughed off by the interiorization of individuality, gender roles were not; if anything, the de-emphasis of other categorical differentiations made gender distinctions seem all the more innate and ‘natural’.
In its ironic self-deprecation, which invites us to disagree by acknowledging our appreciation with applause, the Epilogue celebrates the power and pleasure of theatricality – a theatricality that the play itself reminds us is not contained by the walls of the theater. At the same time, the Epilogue’s insistence on a biological essentialism that ultimately determines social and sexual behavior (‘If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me’ [14–16]) limits the power of costume by insisting that the boy actor, however convincing in ‘the woman’s part’, is not transformed by it.