Assignment
Name: Jalondhara Ravji.J
Roll No: 35
M.A. Sem:- 1
Enrollment No: 2069108420180024
Email Id: ravjijalandhara@gmail.com
Year: 2017-18
Paper: 1
Submitted To: Department of English, M.K.Bhavnagar
University
“Shakespeare and
Politics”
Ø
Introduction:
This important collection of essays from Shakespeare Survey, the first
published in 1975, shows a full range of writing on Shakespeare and politics
with shifts of focus as diverse as biography, text and contexts, language and
film, and from perspectives that are literary, historical, religious,
theoretical and cultural. A new introductory article by John J. Joughin
provides a commentary on the essays, relates them to other work in the field
and gives an over-view of the subject. The comprehensive collection is a
stimulating and provocative introduction to a subject that is complex but never
dull.
Current developments in Shakespeare
criticism expose us to the appropriation and adaptation of the playwright's
work across an ever-reconfiguring array of contextual fields and a variety of
media, including film, television and, most recently, the internet. Yet, even
among those critics who confine themselves to a more traditional definition of
politics, no small part of the politics of reading Shakespeare continues to
come from the struggle for meaning that occurs at the level of the text. The
playwright's oeuvre sustains a productive interpretative ambiguity which defies
each new critical paradigm that attempts to corner or limit it. And it is here
of course, amid the contingencies that inform our critical practice, as well as
our appreciation and reception of the plays themselves, that the
transformational possibilities of ‘Shakespeare’ could truly be said to reside.
In short, the very endurance of the dramatist's work is clearly related to its
ability to withstand interpretations that are often politically contestable or
diametrically opposed; and in some sense, it is precisely this ‘lack of fit’
which has continued to ensure Shakespeare's corpus its socio-political
significance.
Ø
Shakespeare, Politics and Theory:
The refashioning of cultural
identities and the complexity of their restaging necessarily leads us to a more
explicit sense of engagement with literary theory, particularly in relation to
its claim to ‘re politicize’ our understanding of the playwright’s work. In
recent years, the unmasking of literature’s relation to ideology and historical
and political context and the role of the plays in positioning and interrogating
the construction of class, race, gender and sexuality have all provided
immensely important advances in contemporary Shakespeare criticism.
Yet, from the very outset, this new
‘political’ turn in Shakespeare studies met with resistance, especially in the
United States where it began to produce a form of conservative backlash, so
that commentators like Allan Bloom (a long-term advocate for reading
Shakespeare ‘politically’) placed the playwright at the center of a debate
concerning ‘political correctness’.
In the
process, the claim for ‘political struggle’ is itself, Levin implies, at the
very least disingenuous:
Many Marxists claim to be politically
engaged in the narrower and older sense, for they regularly end their articles
and books with calls for action to change society.. These calls to political
action, however, are always very brief and very vague. They never explain what
the goal is, though one can guess that it would be some form of socialism
(totally unlike any existing forms) based on true freedom or justice; or how it
can be achieved, although that presumably would require a revolution by the
oppressed working-class, or how this process is promoted by writing literary
criticism…
In the twentieth century,
Shakespeare’s plays have become one of the central agencies through which our
culture performs this operation. That is what
they do, that is how they work, and that is what they are for.
Shakespeare doesn’t mean: we mean by Shakespeare.
In several respects, the new ‘politicized’
readings that emerged during the 1980s and 1990s focus on the ways in which
Shakespearian plays function as a cultural currency by which we transform
meaning in a variety of contexts and media.
Let’s
discuss Shakespeare, Politics and Media…
Ø
Shakespeare, Politics and Media:
The recent emergence of a new wave of
multinational cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare, as well as the dispersal of
the playwright’s work via the internet and a global Shakespeare industry, has
ensured that the early focus of political criticism on cultural reproduction
and mass media has, if anything, grown apace. So that, nowadays, as Barabara
Hodgdon observes, writing about Shakespeare films constitutes ‘ a major strand
or sub-culture of Shakespeare studies’ and the current volume inevitably
reflects this shift of emphasis.
In ‘Macbeth on film politics’ E.
Pearlman contrasts three filmic reproductions of Shakespeare’s tragedy by Orson
Welles, Roman Polanski and Akira Kurosawa respectively. The fuller purchase of
Pearlman’s argument rests on the extent to which modern interpreters ‘
indifferent to the politics of absolutism’, in seeking to strip Macbeth of its
political content, inadvertently impose their own forms of political vision on
the play.
Ø Shakespeare, Political Theatre:
During the Elizabethan and Jacobean
eras, a play’s message had to please the patronizing royal courts or grave
consequences could follow. William Shakespeare, however, somehow avoided the
wrath of royal authorities while fellow playwrights were jailed for writing
controversial works. Donald Watson writes, ‘Within these general contexts of
State censorship and Court patronage, the professional theatre of Shakespeare’s
time developed as an institution of Elizabethan culture and generated both its capacity
for pleasing the Queen and its potential for subverting the pyramidal structure
of monarchy and its hierarchical ideology.’ Conversely, the
Elizabethan court was modeled as a performance in chivalry and courtly behavior.
Shakespeare never lost the opportunity
to introduce messages, patronized or personal, within his plays either. By
illustrating examples of political and social conduct within his plays, while
excluding practical tests of theory, Shakespeare demonstrated how to abandon or
adhere to political doctrine without personally taking sides. Othello examined forbidden love, yet never sided on the
social deviance presented. Hamlet
touched upon the role of kingship, faith and moral consequence. Anthony and Cleopatra expounded the tragedy of lovers.
Contemporary debate in King Lear
questions the bard’s use of actors in dual roles, to demonstrate concepts of
hidden friendship, trust and foolishness. Nevertheless, to
serve their own political agendas, others did exploit Shakespeare’s plays.
Shakespearian theatre provided the
opportunity to challenge the social and ‘natural’ hierarchies of period England
without overtly creating political statements against nobility or the crown. Yet, Shakespeare never was a political propagandist.
The portrayals within Shakespeare’s plays merely provided a venue for the
public to question their own perceptions of the social and natural order of
life and make choices after viewing these interpretations. While
politically sensitive, Shakespeare managed to express political ideas within
plays yet avoid the labels of traitor or anarchist.
Ø
Summing up:
On the whole, the attribution to him
of a kind of political wisdom or social insight has come from persons who are
temporarily more interested in virtue than in art. In considering the
significance of paraphrasable statements of social assent or social dissent in
the plays, our admiration for Shakespeare's intellectual powers should not
entice us into believing him to have been politically wiser than his generation
or than his own social position. Shakespeare's first commitment to his art
(before we search for his commitment to other things), we can generally discern
adequate and satisfying artistic reasons for the existence of those clever and
ever-quotable examples of social and political opinions in his plays.
Works Cited
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511815256.002.
https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Politics-Catherine-M-Alexander/.../052154481...
n.d.
www.britaininprint.net/study_tools/political_theatre.html.
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