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4 - Social justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Robin Headlam Wells
Affiliation:
Roehampton University, London
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Summary

Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a work of extraordinary imaginative power. Its influence on postmodern Shakespeare criticism can hardly be exaggerated. For a time in the 1980s and 1990s it was impossible to open a collection of Cultural Materialist or New Historicist essays without finding an analysis of this Elizabethan play as a epitome of the carceral society, or that Jacobean play as covert legitimation of state violence through the production and containment of subversion. Through his gifted populariser Stephen Greenblatt, Foucault spoke to a generation of Shakespeareans in a way that no other analyst of bourgeois society had done before. In this chapter I'll discuss a classic Foucauldian reading of Measure for Measure that sees the play as a dramatic picture of a police state in-the-making where citizens are subjected to new forms of surveillance, and delinquent sexuality is produced as a way of justifying more punitive forms of social control. Does a presentist reading of this kind need to justify its claims by reference to the text itself with its structural parallels and contrasts, verbal patterning, biblical motifs, and other artistic devices by which meanings are generated? Probably not. If your ultimate purpose is not to recover unfamiliar ways of thinking, but to enlist Shakespeare as a spokesman for postmodern theories of culture, then there's no reason to be bound by the text. ‘Creative’ reading against the grain is a perfectly acceptable procedure in postmodern literary criticism. What is important, I shall argue, is to be clear about the difference between a presentist and an historicist approach.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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  • Social justice
  • Robin Headlam Wells, Roehampton University, London
  • Book: Shakespeare's Humanism
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483622.006
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  • Social justice
  • Robin Headlam Wells, Roehampton University, London
  • Book: Shakespeare's Humanism
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483622.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Social justice
  • Robin Headlam Wells, Roehampton University, London
  • Book: Shakespeare's Humanism
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483622.006
Available formats
×