By W. B. Worthen

Shakespeare and the strength of recent functionality asks a critical theoretical query within the research of drama: what's the dating among the dramatic textual content and the meanings of functionality? W.B. Worthen argues that the textual content can't govern the strength of its functionality. as a substitute, the textual content turns into major in simple terms as embodied within the altering conventions of its functionality. Worthen explores this figuring out of dramatic performativity by way of interrogating a number of modern websites of Shakespeare construction. The booklet contains specified discussions of contemporary movies and level productions, and units Shakespeare functionality along different works of up to date drama and theatre.

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Example text

Early modern writers “wrote in a palimpsest of two different ideas about how writing is related to speech” (Smith, Acoustic World 239), and the publishing of plays – still in tension today between the expectation of formal regularity and a range of print conventions unique to drama – is one place where we might expect the persistence of rhetorical pointing and of idiosyncratic print features devised to prompt, even to direct, performance. This ambivalence is expressed in several ways in early modern printed plays.

To frame this ongoing historical dialogue, Bristol must at once resist a “universal” or dehistoricized Shakespeare and a hermetically “localized” Shakespeare as well: Shakespeare can neither transcend the past nor be entombed within it. Instead Bristol captures the text’s potential to stage a dialogue across history – to say something determinate, while at the same time remaining open to later interrogation – in his vivid translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s bolshoe vremja as “big time” (10). Taking the uncritical celebration of textual indeterminacy and the “abolition of the author” (54) to represent a willful evacuation of the materiality of writing, its character as labor, Bristol frames literary artifacts as “the deliberate and purposeful work” of human agents (18), evoking the ethical dimension of writing-in-history.

Sir Thomas Bodley, Letters (221–22) Dramatic performativity in the West – the consensus regarding the construction of meaning between inscribed texts and theatrical performance – has been decisively shaped by print and the cognate institutions of modern literacy and literate culture. Now, in the era of digitized writing, print has come increasingly to be seen as a central, perhaps the central, technology in the formation of Western culture in the past six centuries: critically enabling social and political history (the Reformation, the wars of independence, even the idea of “nation” itself ); installing a characteristic conception of language and its workings; inflecting the practices of writing and reading, and decisively shaping literacy and literature; becoming the vehicle of a 40 Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance distinctive sense of privacy, identity, and experience; and so providing the crucial vehicle of subject formation in this extended historical period.

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