Bifold Authority in Shakespeare's Theatre

Abstract

INCE THE QUESTION OF AUTHORITY APPEARS TO BE profoundly implicated in Shakespeare's representations as well as in our own discursive practice (and'especially in prologues, then and now), it may not seem amiss to set out on a note of definition and methodology. Once we recognize that the history of the uses of authority cannot be discussed innocently today (as if the hugeness of the problem of authority in our own writing and reading would not radically affect our approach to the discourse of the past), some of our perspectives on sixteenth-century representations need to be reassessed. There is reason to believe that the issue of authority in the Shakespearean theatre is inextricably entangled in social, cultural, and discursive divisions in sixteenth-century English history.1 Both the grounds and the effects of authority in this period are enmeshed in largely unsanctioned signifying activities, in a proliferation of signs and significations, and in the remarkably expansive lexical register of the English language at the time (as richly attested in the pages of the OED). These in their turn relate to the post-Reformation explosion in the divided uses of ideology; the growth in debate, translation, and interpretation; and the continuous spread of literacy and articulateness made possible through the increased circulation and appropriation of printed texts in the vernacular. Under these conditions sixteenth-century English culture and society witnessed the beginnings of a new mode of discourse that exhausted, suspended, and finally broke with the order of similitude.2 This discourse culminated in that disparate set of relationships between language, power, and authority best exemplified in Shakespearean drama. Let me suggest that, in Shakespeare's time, language-which was in a state of flux and expansion-deeply engaged social practice, just as social activities themselves informed the signifying and word-formation process. The proliferation of linguistic forms in Renaissance