This book argues that Shakespeare was permanently preoccupied
with the brutality, corruption, and ultimate groundlessness of the
political order of his state, and that the impact of original Tudor
censorship, supplemented by the relatively depoliticizing aesthetic
traditions of later centuries, have together obscured the
consistent subversiveness of his work. Traditionally, Shakespeare's
political attitudes have been construed either as primarily
conservative, or as essays in richly imaginative ambiguation,
irreducible to settled viewpoints. Fitter contends that government
censorship forced superficial acquiescence upon Shakespeare in
establishment ideologies ? monarchic, aristocratic and patriarchal
? that were enunciated through rhetorical set pieces, but that
Shakespeare the dramatist learned from Shakespeare the actor a
variety of creative methods for sabotaging those perspectives in
performance in the public theatres. Using historical
contextualizations and recuperation of original performance values,
the book argues that Shakespeare emerged as a radical writer not in
middle age with King Lear and Coriolanus ? plays whose radicalism
is becoming widely recognized ? but from his outset, with Henry VI
and Taming of the Shrew. Recognizing Shakespeare's allusiveness to
1590s controversies and dissident thought, and recovering the
subtextual politics of Shakespeare's distinctive stagecraft reveals
populist, at times even radical meaning and a substantially new,
and astonishingly interventionist, Shakespeare.
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