Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The scope of this chapter would seem less narrow were its title “Renaissance Comedy and Material Life.” This is even though “material” is an adjective of multiple meanings, many of which have relevance as immediate for the study of Shakespeare as of his contemporaries. To remark just two of the ways in which the word is in active circulation in scholarly writing, Shakespeare's comedies are without question full of material objects, both called out as stage properties and referenced in dialogue. And the plays are of course key sites for the intervention of critics concerned to recover the material conditions that produced historical ideologies, institutions, subjectivities, and sexualities. But the term “material life ” has a specific valence in contemporary critical discourse, most often relating to what we might describe as the “everyday” life of “ordinary” people, and it is in this arena that Shakespeare's works appear to come up short. Because it is so perilous to attempt to delimit and recover a historical “ordinary,” the word “material” is made to oblige for a range of interpretive objectives that find their readiest articulation in negative terms. These are concerns with subjects other than elite culture, high politics, structures of institutional power, and instruments of authority. They reflect interests in women as well as men, citizens rather more than courtiers, and ... log in or subscribe to read full text