The Unmasking of Drama: Contested Representation in Shakespeare's Tragedies

Abstract

No group of plays has been invested - by viewers, by readers and nations - with greater powers of representation than Shakespeare's. In The Unmasking of Drama, Jonathan Baldo reveals the flaws within the widespread assumption that Shakespeare's plays possess an almost limitless capacity to represent, to speak on behalf of subsequent generations and other cultures. He shows that one of the great ironies of such a universalist Shakespeare is that Shakespearean drama itself challenges the Renaissance era's dominant ideas about representation: for instance, the assumption that a single body, a monarch, can represent an entire people. From Hamlet to Coriolanus and Timon of Athens, Shakespeare's tragedies constitute the most strenuous attempts within English Renaissance tragedy to unmask its representational practices and to penetrate its own ordering principles. Through a careful examination of Shakespeare's tragedies, Baldo evaluates theatre's economical means of representation, its heavy reliance on the authority of generalising, and its assumption of a translatability between visual and verbal signs. He discovers that those modes of representation echo Renaissance assumptions about political representation, and as a result, Shakespearean drama's self-investigations bear powerful political implications. In many of Shakespeare's plays may be read the demise of an older, corporeal concept of representation tied to the body and visibility and tentative steps toward a new concept of representation, one that will be tied to the rise of parliamentary government.