Abstract

We seem to be on the way to establishing a new consensus, if not a new orthodoxy in Renaissance studies, especially with respect to the Shakespearean canon. To the extent that the old consensus included a historical component, its history was, we are now being told, unitary, idealist, and exclusionary. Most often taken to task in this connection is Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture (1943). As Raymond Williams points out (1985, 233-4), Tillyard and his contemporaries were motivated in part by a desire to contain rash interpretations of Shakespeare's plays that confounded Elizabethan beliefs and actions with those of our own time. But the effect of their efforts to situate the plays against the background of a one-dimensional ''world picture was to contain the dynamic complexities of the dramatic works themselves, and of the social conditions that produced them. Williams's remarks occur in his afterword to the recently published volume Political Shakespeare (Dollimore and Sinfield, 1985). The essays collected there and in another recent volume, Alternative Shakespeares (Drakakis, 1985), are committed to demythologizing the modern Shakespearean aesthetic in which dramatic resolution is viewed as the expression of a unified poetic sensibility and of a coherent world picture.

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