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Shakespeare and the fiction of theatre
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Fletcher, Andrew (2019) Shakespeare and the fiction of theatre. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3942839
Abstract
Why are we still enchanted by Shakespeare? If, as historicists claim, Shakespeare’s plays are embedded in their historical conditions of production, are we, as contemporary spectators, simply therefore dupes of a culture industry aimed at creating ideologically freighted and misleading accounts of the plays? On the other hand, is it dishonest to imply that we can reproduce the conditions under which the plays were initially realised, or best consider them purely at the point of contemporary consumption? If, in turn, theories designed to liberate us from the alleged pitfalls of such approaches can themselves be turned to legitimise views as rebarbative as those they initially exposed, why should we care about Shakespeare? This thesis argues that we are not wrong to be enchanted by Shakespeare, but that a great many of the obstacles to enchantment - including, it will be argued, the way Shakespeare’s works dramatise enchantment itself - need to be honestly encountered.
The way I attempt to achieve this is by using a conception of the aesthetic which considers the way in which a group of plays unmake rather than attempting to recover meanings that are presumed to be constituted by or inferred from them. At the heart of this is what I have called “the fiction of theatre” where, by breaking the illusion upon which theatrical representation depends, and by using theatrical technique in a way which undermines the metaphor that “all the world’s a stage” Shakespeare’s drama creates an experience which unfixes the possibility of regarding any cognitive structure as “natural” or “given”. In this way the plays are seen to resist the kind of closure that allows them to become commodities, or to lend themselves to an older, autotelic, view of the aesthetic based on the identity of form and content. If Shakespeare’s works are to be significant to us today, we also need to establish a way in which it makes sense to speak of the plays as being at once in and out of our conception of historical time; not losing the insights of historically inspired criticism, but acknowledging that these explanatory schemes cannot exhaust the plays as they are experienced. This notion of the aesthetic, articulated finally in terms of the gift, implies an ethical value which, it will be argued, modifies contemporary conceptions of the work of art as embodying a utopian vision.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN2000 Dramatic representation. The Theater P Language and Literature > PR English literature |
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Dramatic production, Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Appreciation -- Great Britain, Aestheticism (Literature) , Aesthetics, Theater | ||||
Official Date: | September 2019 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Purcell, Stephen, 1981- | ||||
Format of File: | |||||
Extent: | 229 pages | ||||
Language: | eng |
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