Notorious identity: materializing the subject in Shakespeare

Abstract

Richard III, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, were all significant figures in the Renaissance, long before Shakespeare took up the task of giving them new life on the stage. And when he did, Linda Charnes argues, he used these legendary figures to explore the emergence and ideological uses of a new kind of fame - - an infamy based not on the moral and ethical use value of legend but on a commodification of itself: one that must be understood in the context of early modern England's emergent capitalism and its conditions of economic, textual, theatrical, and cultural reproduction. No other Shakespearean figure carries as much ideological and textual baggage as Richard III, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra. Charnes shows that by representing them as latecomers on the scenes of their own legends, Shakespeare reveals what's involved for the figures themselves in their experience of reiteration: what it is like to be subjected to the over-determining force of the notorious name. Ranging across the fields of cultural materialism, new historicism, feminist psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, deconstruction, and theories of postmodemity, the author practices a theory without organs - which she provocatively calls a constructive New Hystericism - retheorizing the discourses of reigning methodologies as much as those in Shakespeare's plays. Addressing a postmodern culture that fetishizes names and celebrity, the author moves from the notoriety of Richard III to that of Willie Horton, from Troilus and Cressida to Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, from Antony and Cleopatra to the manufacturing of Shakespeare's own identity in mass culture and contemporary politics, unmasking in Shakespeare's notorious figures the symptoms of an early modern commodification of the powerful desire that we now know is the desire for signification itself.