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Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright.

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Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright By Patrick Cheney Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004

The twenty-first century is witnessing a quiet revolution in Shakespeare studies. Since the fanfares have been so muted, its authors might well be surprised to find themselves classified as revolutionaries at all. Nevertheless, if they are right, it is time to think differently about Shakespeare. More than two decades after New Historicism turned our attention away from close reading and toward locating Shakespeare more firmly in his own culture, scholarship is shifting our focus onto Shakespeare's own place in that culture itself, and the case is founded firmly on the texts. Though they are fully aware of each other's work, the scholars in question have not yet, so far as I know, declared themselves a group; moreover, there are significant differences of emphasis in their books. But since the institution of English loves a label, I shall dwell on what they have in common to call them Intertextual Historicists.

Between them, the Intertextual Historicists seriously call into question the Shakespeare most of us have come to take for granted, man of the theater, populist, indifferent to posterity and, indeed, to his own writing as art. The works of this conventional Shakespeare lived fully only on the stage and have come down to us largely as an accident of history, or thanks to the commercial instincts of the Shakespeare company. The printed texts, so the story has increasingly gone, should be treated as no more than scripts for performance. As for the poems, they were incidental to Shakespeare's real concerns, written in idle moments, or designed to keep their author in business at times when plague closed the theaters.

We have assimilated these convictions so gradually and for so long, and their implications for editors and historians of performance, as well as scholars and critics, have been so widely embraced, that only an overwhelming case could cause us to modify them. In my view, however, that case is in the process of being made. In 2003, when Lukas Erne argued for Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, (1) the established position became a good deal less plausible. The "good" printed texts of the plays, Erne argued persuasively, are not best understood as mere traces of lost performances. On the contrary, they survive as works in their own right, addressed to readers, and they often amplify the version an audience would probably have seen. A Shakespeare play might well exist, if Erne is right, in two different texts, to a degree independently, as theatrical event...

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