Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts [Hardcover]

Revisionist Shakespeare appropriates revisionist history in order to both criticize traditional transitional interpretations of Shakespearean drama and to offer a new methodology for understanding representations of social conflict in Shakespeare's play and in Early Modern English culture. Rather than argue that Shakespearean drama allegorizes historical transitions and ideological polarization, Revisionist Shakespeare argues that Shakespeare's plays explore the nature of internally contradictory Early Modern institutions and belief-systems that are only indirectly related to competing political and class ideologies. Such institutions and belief-systems include Elizabethan strategies for the management of vagrancy, the nature of Jacobean statecraft, objective and subjective theories of economic value, Protestant ethical theory, and Augustinian notions of sinful habituation. The book looks at five of Shakespeare's plays: The Tempest , Coriolanus , The Merchant of Venice , King Lear , and Hamlet .Introduction The Early Modern Original Condition: Natural Rights and Marxist Ethics in King Lear The End of Absolutism: Coriolanus and the Consensual Nature of the Early Modern State Rethinking the Discourse of Colonialism in Economic Terms: Captain John Smith's Virginia Narratives, Vagrancy and the Tempest Mercantilist Fallacies and Subjective Demand: Early Modern Theories of Value and the Merchant of Venice 'Damned Custom...Habits Devil': Hamlet, Antidualism, and the Early Modern Philosophy of Mind

This intelligent book argues that Shakespeare's plays are much more thoughtful about their world - and constructions of it - than often believed. Cefalu shows that rather than allegorically reflecting historical reality and change, such plays as Hamlet and King Lear meditate on profound contradictions in early modern society and ideology. Usefully enriched by attention to intellectual history and literary form, Revisionist Shakespeare comes as a welcome qualification of lĂ+