What is the Canon of English Drama, 1660-1737?

Abstract

IN A RECENT ARTICLE, Robert Weimann summarizes the enormous impact of poststructuralist criticism on studies. As we all know, centrality was (or even is) traditionally defined in terms of representing the genius and universality of human nature and experience. Post-structuralist critics have challenged the entire tradition of English literature by denying the self-evident and permanent grounds for canonization. Instead, we have been forced to recognize the ways in which powerful interests in society have always appropriated for their own cultural agenda. The bard is just another producer of texts implicated by the history of ideological practice. Shakespeare is in ideology(ies) at least as much as ideology is in Shakespeare. Since Shakespeare's plays have no meanings, only uses, and truth in them is conceived, not perceived, they must be resisted along with their author and the canon which places him at its centre. Weimann's conclusion, no longer as shocking as it was when he wrote it just a few years ago, formulates the new critical orthodoxy: What, I think, validly emerges from the new critical practice is the inscription of a cultural situation in which 'meaning' in Shakespearean drama can no longer be read in terms of the privileged representativity of an academic or artistic elite or as something simply given by some unquestioned intellectual authority or consensus in interpretation.' This conclusion should no doubt apply equally well to post-Restoration drama,