Overview
The new practices and theories of parliamentary representation that emerged during Elizabeth's and James' reigns shattered the unity of human agency, redefined the nature of power, transformed the image of the body politic, and unsettled constructs and concepts as fundamental as the relation between presence and absence. In The Third Citizen, Oliver Arnold argues that recovering the formation of political representation as an effective ideology should radically change our understanding of early modern political culture, Shakespeare's political art, and the way Anglo-American critics, for whom representative democracy is second nature, construe both. In magisterial readings of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and the First Tetralogy, Arnold discovers a new Shakespeare who was neither a conservative apologist for monarchy nor a prescient, liberal champion of the House of Commons but instead a radical thinker and artist who demystified the ideology of political representation in the moment of its first flowering. Shakespeare believed that political representation produced (and required for its reproduction) a new kind of subject and a new kind of subjectivity, and he fashioned a new kind of tragedy to represent the loss of power, the fall from dignity, the false consciousness, and the grief peculiar to the experiences of representing and of being represented. Representationalism and its subject mark the beginning of political modernity; Shakespeare's tragedies greet political representationalism with skepticism, bleakness, and despair.
Full Product Details
Author: Oliver Arnold (Associate Professor, University of California Berkeley)
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Imprint: Johns Hopkins University Press
Edition: annotated edition
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.40cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.590kg
ISBN: 9780801885044
ISBN 10: 0801885043
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 07 May 2007
Recommended Age: From 17
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
Arnold's dense book explores the fertile ground left mostly unturned by new historicist approaches of early modern politics... Brilliant and well-documented analysis of Shakespeare's 'representational plays'. -- Marie-Dominique Garnier Cercles 2007 A compelling historical refinement... Recommended. Choice 2007 Remarkably scholarly... This seminal redrawing of power and politics in late Tudor and early Stuart England takes its authority from the tight analogies it makes between political events and governmental practice in Shakespeare's time and its detailed examination of key scenes in a half-dozen of his plays. In confronting our common assumptions of the period, it forces us to rethink our own historical beliefs. -- Arthur F. Kinney Renaissance Quarterly 2007 Intelligent and important book... A bracing riposte to revisionist historians. -- Anne McLaren English Historical Review 2008 A superb look at Shakespearean politics. Studies in English Literature 2008 Promises a fresh and original approach. -- Richard McCoy Comparative Drama 2008 Provides some needed and very stimulating ideas and evidence with which to develop scholarly analysis of the ways in which contemporaries thought about parliamentary representation, and about the problems involved in making such a system both meaningful and practicable. -- Jason Peacey H-Net Reviews 2008 A serious book about an important subject and a work that anyone interested in Shakespeare's political thought should read carefully... I admire The Third Citizen. Clio 2008 Arnold quite convincingly documents his major claim. -- Maurice Hunt English Studies 2008
A compelling, lucid, and critically important intervention in a series of overlapping fields: Shakespeare studies, Renaissance studies, and cultural studies. In addition to startlingly fresh and persuasive interpretations of familiar plays, Oliver Arnold offers a whole new way of understanding the politics of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. - Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University
Author Information
Oliver Arnold is an associate professor of English at Princeton University.
