Re-shaping 'King Lear': Space, Place, Costume, and Genre

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Published: Jun 1, 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/lincu-2017-0002
Keywords:
critical and performance studies heterocosms and theatrical locations generic decorum and inwardness embedded descriptions denotement seeing and reading King Lear fairground theatres “folk-drama” truth and realism

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Michael Hattaway
New York University in London, UK

Abstract

Performance studies must enjoy parity of esteem with critical studies because they remind us of the plurality of “readings” that are generated by a Shakespearean text. Shakespeare seems to have apprehended this when, in Othello, he used a nonce-word, “denotement”, which applies to Othello’s reading of his wife in his mind’s eye. I examine other sequences in which we watch a character “reading” on-stage or imagined action, in Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, Cymbeline, Richard II, and Troilus and Cressida. In Hamlet this involves re-reading as well as generic displacement, which, I argue, is a way of rendering inwardness. As I test case, I analyse a production of King Lear by Shakespeare’s Globe, on a fairground stage, in which the king reshaped himself, became a folkloric figure, like a figure in Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament. The play itself was thus, indecorously, reshaped as “The Tale of King Lear”. “Dramatic truth”, therefore, in no way depends upon theatrical “realism”.

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How to Cite
Hattaway, M. “Re-Shaping ’King Lear’: Space, Place, Costume, and Genre”. Linguaculture, vol. 8, no. 1, June 2017, pp. 9-22, doi:10.1515/lincu-2017-0002.
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Vol. 8 No. 1 (2017)
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Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Michael Hattaway, New York University in London, UK

Michael Hattawayis Professor of English at New York University in London and Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the University of Sheffield. He was born in New Zealand and studied in Wellington and at Cambridge. Author of Elizabethan Popular Theatre (1982), Hamlet: The Critics Debate (1987), and Renaissance and Reformations: An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature (2005); editor of As You Like It, and 1-3 Henry VI (New Cambridge Shakespeare), of plays by Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont, and of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays (2002); and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (1990 and 2003) and Shakespeare in the New Europe (1994). He has written an electronic book on King Richard II (2008) and edited A NewCompanion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (2 vols, 2010). In 2010 he gave the Annual Shakespeare Lecture for the British Academy, and in 2015 the opening keynote for the European Shakespeare Research Association in Worcester.

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