Revisionist Shakespeare

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Introduction: On Shakespearean Contradictions

   • Paul Cefalu

   Pages 1-24

3. Rethinking Colonialism in Economic Terms: The Tempest, Captain John Smith’s Virginia Narratives, and the English Response to Vagrancy

   • Paul Cefalu

   Pages 25-52

4. The Ends of Absolutism: Coriolanus and Jacobean Political Irony

   • Paul Cefalu

   Pages 53-77

5. Shylock as Homo Sacer?: Mercantilist Fallacies and Subjective Demand in The Merchant of Venice

   • Paul Cefalu

   Pages 79-110

6. The Early Modern Veil of Ignorance: Natural Rights Theory in King Lear

   • Paul Cefalu

   Pages 111-144

7. “Damnéd Custom … Habits Devil”: Hamlet’s Part-Whole Fallacy and the Early Modern Philosophy of Mind

   • Paul Cefalu

   Pages 145-172

8. Back Matter

   Pages 173-212

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Revisionist Shakespeare appropriates revisionist history in order to both criticize traditional transitional interpretations of Shakespearean drama and to offer a new methodology for understanding representations of social conflict in Shakespeare's play and in Early Modern English culture. Rather than argue that Shakespearean drama allegorizes historical transitions and ideological polarization, Revisionist Shakespeare argues that Shakespeare's plays explore the nature of internally contradictory Early Modern institutions and belief-systems that are only indirectly related to competing political and class ideologies. Such institutions and belief-systems include Elizabethan strategies for the management of vagrancy, the nature of Jacobean statecraft, objective and subjective theories of economic value, Protestant ethical theory, and Augustinian notions of sinful habituation. The book looks at five of Shakespeare's plays: The Tempest , Coriolanus , The Merchant of Venice , King Lear , and Hamlet .

• culture
• drama
• Hamlet
• Ideologie
• King Lear
• Marxism
• Narrative
• Shakespearean drama
• Tradition
• William Shakespeare

"This intelligent book argues that Shakespeare's plays are much more thoughtful about their world - and constructions of it - than often believed. Cefalu shows that rather than allegorically reflecting historical reality and change, such plays as Hamlet and King Lear meditate on profound contradictions in early modern society and ideology. Usefully enriched by attention to intellectual history and literary form, Revisionist Shakespeare comes as a welcome qualification of new historicism and cultural materialism alike. No serious student of Shakespeare and early modern literature can afford to overlook this book." - Douglas Bruster, author of Shakespeare and the Question of Culture

"Paul Cefalu is properly wary of the tendency on the part of many early modern literary critics to align literary characters - in King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, and Coriolanus, for example - into two ideological camps, the old feudal guard and the new bourgeois individualists. He rejects both idealized narratives of progress and orthodox Whig-Marxist theories of ideological class conflict, preferring instead Marx's primitive accumulation model of the rise of capitalism. He sees Shakespearean drama as allegorizing functional contradictions and historical ironies that are specific to a range of early modern institutions and belief systems, including the Elizabethan poor law regime and the management of vagrancy, theories of economic value, the nature of statecraft, Protestant ethical theory, and Augustinian notions of sinful habituation. Cefalu's interest in how things work rather than why Shakespearean characters act as they do makes for a compelling, tightly-argued plea on behalf of a new methodology for understanding the representation of social and economic change in Shakespearean drama." - David Bevington, Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities, University of Chicago

PAUL CEFALU is Assistant Professor at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, USA.

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