In Shakespeare After Theory, published in 1999, David Scott Kastan prescribed a new rubric for historical scholarship in Shakespeare studies, attuned and indebted to the theoretical advances instigated by critics on either side of the Atlantic in the 1980s, but retaining a principal focus on what he calls a “more rigorously historical” evaluation of the conditions of dramatic production than has been offered by many New Historicist or Cultural Materialist readings (24). Kastan frivolously called his project “the New Boredom,” in contradistinction to some of the charges of over-elaboration that he levels at New Historicism. Most notably, he claims that “[i]n its often dazzling demonstrations of the circulation of discourses through culture, New Historicism has rarely paid much attention to the specific material and institutional conditions of the discursive exchanges it has explored” (ibid. 13). As such, he considers New Historicism to be insufficiently historical, with its complex anecdotes often liable to retotalising culture and ignoring its contradictions.
What Kastan proposes, and self-deprecatingly refers to as boring, is a “post-theoretical” return to a more traditional type of historical scholarship, albeit enlightened by the insights that twentieth-
century developments in literary theory have given us. In terms of Shakespeare specifically, Kastan advocates a “recognition of the historicity of the play” by means of “a focus on the specific conditions of its production and reception,” and this points towards the principal objective of the present study (ibid. 35). In the reading of the Globe tragedies that follows, this study adopts Kastan's principle of considering a given literary work in terms of four specific categories that clarify how that work may produce and convey meaning. He affirms at the end of the chapter entitled “Are We Being Interdisciplinary Yet?” that the historicity of the work is best apprehended if it is examined “as a verbal structure, as a cultural gesture, as a material object, and as a commodity” (ibid. 48). The three principal chapters of this investigation, which focus on Shakespeare's physical, professional, and socio-cultural environments in turn, combine in their assessment of the selected plays to cover these four specific categories.
A further important notion to be drawn from Shakespeare After Theory is the view that the acceptance of literary texts as socially produced need not necessarily mean that they themselves exercise a political function, and that our identification of the complexities of meaning to be derived from a text is “not necessarily itself a political act” (ibid. 20). This study follows Kastan in refusing to accept the chiasmic formulation of the historicity of texts and the textuality of history as propagated by New Historicism (ibid. 22), and does so by narrowing its focus to the conditions of performance that affected the Globe tragedies in Shakespeare's London, or in other words, by analysing how place may have shaped the plays. This does not constitute a denial of the potential, subversive or otherwise, for Renaissance texts to produce culture and effectuate social change. The study chooses to limit itself to an examination of the ways in which material and ideological conditions of the environment impinged upon the conception and enactment of the plays, thereby acknowledging and consolidating its position as a historically informed literary study, as opposed to a socio- political history informed by literature.
In reviewing Shakespeare After Theory, Robert Weimann sees the ultimate objective of Kastan's project, attained to varying degrees across the collection of essays, as the promulgation of a challenge “to reimagine Shakespeare's plays as inclusive as well as contestatory, enchanting as well as disenchanting, images of triumph and defeat as well as grim documents of social and gendered struggle” (192). When successfully employed, such a historical reading differs markedly from
its more politically entrenched predecessors, and can represent the “fair conjunction of textual scholarship and historical criticism, including theater history” (ibid.), at which this study also aims to arrive. Weimann neatly summarises Kastan's “re-turn” to history as a move “from a politically correct moralism to a politically pregnant materialism” (ibid. 191). The phrase signals the plurality of meanings and the political inclusivity of Shakespearean tragedy which the present study looks to emphasise by means of a dispassionate examination of historical contexts. Mindful that the attempt by any text to deny political orientation and/or motivation may itself be construed as a political act, terms such as “apolitical” or “non-political” are cautiously avoided here. Moreover, given the onus on the historicity of texts, and on the various socio-political shaping factors inscribed within them, it would make little sense for this study to disavow its own cultural moment. In other words, rather than laying claim to an apolitical stance, the present study readily situates itself as politically centrist, and as a work which collapses the subversion/containment distinction in order to highlight the multifarious and inclusive nature of Shakespearean tragedy.
2.6. Presentism
An important critical response to Shakespeare After Theory was offered by Terence Hawkes in Shakespeare in the Present, which was published in 2002 and followed in 2007 by a collection of essays entitled Presentist Shakespeares. Hawkes had “championed the radical potential” of literature in the context of British Cultural Materialism, and did much to institutionalise aforementioned notions of the ineluctability of politics, as John Drakakis informs: “[t]he acceptance […] that literature is inevitably political, that decisions about what counts as literature are influenced by social hierarchies, and that the ways we read literature have political effects owe much to Hawkes's influence” (n. pag.). In Shakespeare in the Present, Hawkes directly counters Kastan's call for rigorous historical enquiry by arguing that targets for Shakespeare studies should be set unabashedly in terms of current socio-cultural concerns: “Reversing, to some degree, the stratagems of new historicism, [presentism] deliberately begins with the material present and allows that to set its interrogative agenda” (22). Unsurprisingly for an innovative approach to criticism endorsed by Hawkes, presentism barely conceals its politics, employing the metaphor
of a Heimlich manoeuvre–with overtones of eruption, regurgitation, renewal–for an introductory manifesto that Hawkes himself labels “most radical” (ibid.). Again, the study of Shakespeare's tragedies that follows in these pages makes no pretence to divorce itself from its own context, and indeed acknowledges a very present concern to highlight the importance of place in the shaping of the selected plays, but it shares little else with the practice of Hawkes and his peers, where politically motivated forays into the past enrich what is essentially a cultural history of the present informed by literature.
Nonetheless, the arguments in favour of a presentist criticism offered by Hawkes are of use to this study in terms of their direct engagement with Kastan's propositions. Indeed, Shakespeare in the Present opens with a nod to the role of Shakespeare After Theory as part of a “changing climate” in the field (ibid. 1). Hawkes quickly isolates key problems in Kastan's “return to history,” namely the veneration of facts and the imperative to “restore” Shakespeare's works to their original circumstances. “Restore” is shown to be a loaded term, possibly implying a unified truth sought by the historian, while Hawkes argues that “[t]o reduce history to a series of isolateable, untheorised 'facts', or neutrally analysable 'texts', is in any case unproductive” (ibid. 3). In a reference to his earlier book entitled Meaning by Shakespeare (1992), Hawkes artfully instructs that facts or texts have no immanent meaning, but are only employed for purposes of our choosing:
Indeed, they don't speak at all unless and until they are inserted into and perceived as part of specific discourses which impose their own shaping requirements and agendas. We choose the facts. We choose the texts. We do the inserting. We do the perceiving. Facts and texts, that is to say, don't simply speak, don't merely mean. We speak, we mean, by them. (ibid. 3, original emphasis)
Of course, this is true for the present study, yet an acknowledgement of the instability of so-called facts need not preclude a search for historical accuracy as undertaken here. It must instead serve as a cautionary reminder of the pitfalls of historical investigation.