Introduction: Character Beyond Shakespeare

Abstract

Introduction:Character Beyond Shakespeare Harry Newman (bio) The rise of "new character criticism" is a new chapter in a long story of love and loathing in Shakespeare and early modern English literary studies. Depending on one's perspective, character's recent "comeback" might seem like the final scene of a revenge tragedy, the redemptive end to a prodigal son tale, the refrain in a circuitous poem, or even the revelation of a psychodrama in which "we . . . have ineluctably been character critics all along, though in various states of being closeted" (Yachnin and Slights 1; Ko 8). The last two decades have seen a surge of rich studies that look at character, interiority, and personation in early modern English literature, drawing on the fields of gender, sexuality, and trans studies,1 critical race studies,2 disability studies,3 law,4 Reformation theology,5 animal studies,6 the history of emotions and senses,7 cognitive science,8 linguistic pragmatics,9 the history of authorship and literary culture,10 and ethics and philosophy.11 Responsive to formalist, materialist, and poststructuralist critiques of character as a category of analysis across the twentieth century, new character criticism is more theoretically aware, more interdisciplinary, and more historically conscious than the "old" character criticism of A. C. Bradley and his followers.12 Yet for the most part, an intense focus remains on Shakespeare and his dramatis personae. When discussed, "non-Shakespearean" character and characterization tend to be judged according to enduring "Shakespearean" models of interiority, individuation, and psychological depth. Investigations into the historical development and cultural relevance of character continue to fixate on ground broken and genres dominated by Shakespeare. Character critics rarely look beyond drama, or indeed beyond solo-authored plays, and are usually more [End Page 1] concerned with Shakespeare's exceptionality than his place in a collaborative and intertextual culture of characterological experimentation across a range of genres and media. This special issue brings together six essays that push debates about character beyond the Shakespeare canon, and beyond the priorities and concerns of Shakespeare-centric character criticism, putting "Shakespearean" models and paradigms in dialogue with "non-Shakespearean" ones, and even challenging the Shakespearean / non-Shakespearean binary. It engages with a variety of authors, genres, texts, and practices, many of which have been marginalized in scholarship, in order to expand our understanding of the role of character, personhood, and identity formation in early modern English culture, and to diversify the aims and methodologies of new character criticism. Collectively, the essays in the issue take this opportunity to address a wider range of genres than are traditionally considered (not just drama but also character sketches, prose fiction, elegy, epic, allegory, and life-writing) and to broaden the historical period of enquiry (ranging in focus from the 1580s to the 1680s). They make new and provocative arguments about imitation and style, performance and rhetoric, genre and form, emotional affect, authorship, literary history, and the role of theory. In doing this work, the articles historicize and theorize character with attention to cultural forms and shifts whose relevance has not been properly recognized, including social mobility and urbanization (Fallon), the meme as a unit of cultural transmission (Williams), pedagogic exercises (Olson), accounting methods (Myers), and early news culture (Newman). While literary in focus, the articles cross disciplinary boundaries, engaging with—among other fields and disciplines—anthropology, social history, the digital humanities, book history, and visual culture studies. The articles pay particular attention to the relationship between literature and culture, and share interests in cultural transmission and transaction. In this introduction, I survey and evaluate the state of the field and its critical heritage, exploring what is at stake in moving beyond the methods and preoccupations of a Shakespeare-centric character criticism in early modern studies. The introduction then ends with an overview of the articles in the issue. This special issue is by no means exhaustive. There is important further research to be done in areas not addressed at length here, most notably the rich and varied characterization practices of early modern women writers,13 and the role of race and racialization in early modern ideas about character. Despite the surreptitious white gatekeeping of character and inwardness since their...