Taking "King Lear" as her central text, Judy Kronenfeld seriously
questions the critical assumptions of much of today's most
fashionable Shakespeare scholarship. Charting a new course beyond
both New Historicist and deconstructionist critics, she suggests a
theory of language and interpretation that provides essential
historical and linguistic contexts for the key terms and concepts
of the play. Opening the play up to the implications of these
contexts and this interpretive theory, she reveals much about
"Lear," English Reformation religious culture, and the state of
contemporary criticism.
Kronenfeld's focus expands from the text of Shakespeare's play
to a discussion of a shared Christian culture--a shared language
and set of values--a common discursive field that frames the social
ethics of the play. That expanded focus is used to address the
multiple ways that clothing and nakedness function in the play, as
well as the ways that these particular images and terms are
understood in that shared context. As Kronenfeld moves beyond
"Lear" to uncover the complex resonances of clothing and nakedness
in sermons, polemical tracts, legislation, rhetoric, morality
plays, and actual or alleged practices such as naked revolts by
Anabaptists and the Adamians' ritual disrobing during religious
services, she demonstrates that many key terms and concepts of the
period cannot be tied to a single ideology. Instead, they represent
part of an intricate network of thought shared by people of
seemingly opposite views, and it is within such shared cultural
networks that dissent, resistance, and creativity can emerge.
Warning her readers not to take the language of literary texts out
of the linguistic context within which it first appeared,
Kronenfeld has written a book that reinterprets the linguistic
model that has been the basis for much poststructuralist
criticism.
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