Retheorizing Shakespeare through Presentist Readings offers a
theoretical rationale for the emerging presentist movement in
Shakespeare studies and goes on to show, in a series of close
readings, that a presentist Shakespeare is not an anachronism.
Relying on a Brechtian aesthetic of "na?ve surrealism" as the
performative model of the early modern, urban, public theater,
James O?Rourke demonstrates how this Brechtian model is able to
capture the full range of interplays that could take place between
Shakespeare's words, the nonillusionist performance devices of the
early modern stage, and the live audiences that shared the physical
space of the theatre with Shakespeare's actors. O?Rourke argues
that the limitations placed upon the critical energies of early
modern drama by the influential new historicist paradigm of
contained subversion is based on a poetics of the sublime, which
misrepresents the performative aesthetic of the theater as a
self-sufficient spectacle that compels reception in its own terms.
Reimagining Shakespeare as our contemporary, O?Rourke shows how the
immanent critical logic of Shakespeare's works can enter into
dialogue with our most sophisticated critiques of our cultural
fictions.
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