Early Modern Subjects, Shakespearean Performances, and (Post) Modern Spectators

Abstract

For some time now, attempts to reconstruct and re-mark the history of how interiority and the subjectivity to which that belongs emerged in Western culture have been making critical headlines. According to the proponents of this explicitly anti-humanist and anti-essentialist master narrative, that moment can be precisely located at the time of Shakespeare. Using Hamlet as his example, Francis Barker argues that bourgeois subjectivity comes into being only in the late seventeenth century; challenging idealist conceptions of literary culture and history, Jonathan Dollimore promises to deliver Shakespeare and his contemporaries from the misrepresentations of essentialist humanism. Similarly, Catherine Belsey claims that to search for characters' 'imaginary interiority' is to map modernist notions of a unified, coherent humanist subject onto early modern texts. According to Margareta de Grazia, those texts do represent motives for interiority, or, as Raymond Williams has it, conditions of possibility for occupying such a personal space; but, as Peter Stallybrass maintains, the early modern subject encountered in Shakespeare's texts is not an 'individual'.1 Although that subject may indeed possess a 'self' (in the sense of being distinct from others), he does not have an 'identity' a term that is also absent from Shakespeare's texts and that does not appear, in the sense of denoting individuality, until 1638. In short, we have met the early modern subject, and he is not us. Or is he? Stallybrass argues persuasively that subjects precede individuals, yet it is also the case that the materialist conception of subjectivity which he and others espouse post-dates the individual. Indeed, the EMS an acronym suggesting his status as a syndrome can be seen as the Foucauldian product of certain rearrangements of knowledge: his rediscovery emerges from a poststructuralist critical practice which, by embracing the notion that selves are socially and culturally constructed, would displace, even erase, modernism's naive