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Shakespearean Language and the Public Sphere: Performance and Staged Meaning

By (author) Nigel Wood

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Through a close reading of Shakespeare's works, Nigel Wood argues for the power of Shakespeare's dramatic language to shape the consciousness of the audiences of his time and to play a role in the development of a public sphere in early modern England. He traces the verbal patterning and repetition of a range of keywords across plays, distinguishing between their accepted meaning and the potency of performance to introduce fluid nuances of meaning and significance. It takes seriously therefore the playsâ€™ status as oral performances and the ways in which his language would have resonated with early modern audiences. Beginning by establishing an approach to Shakespeareâ€™s playtexts from the perspective of an audience witnessing a gradually unfolding action, Wood addresses the power of language to create episodes of shock or revelation. Uniting this with Habermas's sense of a Public Sphere, he explores the role of the theatre and early modern audiences in contributing to the Public Sphere by challenging pre-set conventions and ideologies. In chapters on the social, the state, notions of kind and gentility, the human and ceremony/ritual, crucial shades of meaning are uncovered with special reference to a wide range of plays: the Histories, including Coriolanus and Henry V; the Tragedies, such as Hamlet and Othello, and the Comedies, including Much Ado About Nothing and The Merchant of Venice. This is a unique exploration of how Shakespeare in dramatizing and so challenging conventions of language, thereby questioned static cultural assumptions about gender, class and racial difference. Deep-seated critical approaches to canonical texts are thereby questioned in the service of re-capturing their initial public validity.

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