Shakespearean Negotiations [antikvár]

A Note on Texts Throughout this book, except where noted, I have used The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). I have not, however, included the brackets with which the Riverside editors signal their adoption of variant readings. In the body of my book, 1 have modernized spelling in quotations from Renaissance texts, since it seemed odd to cite Shakespeare in a modernized edition while leaving his contemporaries to look quaint and time worn. In the footnotes, I have left titles and quotations the way I found them. Chapter One The Circulation of Social Energy I began with the desire to speak with the dead. This desire is a famihar, if unvoiced, motive in Hterary studies, a motive organized, professionahzed, buried beneath thick layers of bureaucratic decorum: literature professors are salaried, middle-class shamans. If I never beheved that the dead could hear me, and if I knew that the dead could not speak, I was nonetheless certain that I could re-create a conversation with them. Even when I came to understand that in my most intense moments of straining to listen all I could hear was my own voice, even then I did not abandon my desire. It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces make themselves heard in the voices of the living. Many of the traces have httle resonance, though every one, even the most trivial or tedious, contains some fragment of lost life; others seem uncannily full of the will to be heard. It is paradoxical, of course, to seek the living will of the dead in fictions, in places where there was no live bodily being to begin with. But those who love literature tend to find more intensity in simulations—in the formal, self-conscious miming of life—than in any of the other textual traces left by the dead, for simulations are undertaken in full awareness of the absence of the life they contrive to represent, and hence they may skillfully anticipate and compensate for the vanishing of the actual hfe that has empowered them. Conventional in my tastes, I found the most satisfying intensity of all in Shakespeare.