Notorious Identity

A dazzling and challenging book. -- Catherine Belsey, University of Wales College of Cardiff Charnes' writing is witty, and the book as a whole is wonderfully fresh, not only in the originality of its analysis, but also in its irreverence toward received opinion. -- Michael D. Bristol, McGill University

Richard III, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra were figures of intense signification long before Shakespeare gave them new life. When he did, Charnes argues, he used them to explore notorious identity—a new kind of infamy based not on the moral and ethical “use value” of legend but on a commodification of identity itself.Richard III, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra—these were figures of intense signification long before Shakespeare took up the task of giving them new life on the stage. And when he did, Linda Charnes argues, he used these legendary figures to explore a new kind of fame—notorious identity—an infamy based not on the moral and ethical “use value” of legend but on a commodification of identity itself: one that must be understood in the context of early modern England’s emergent capitalism and its conditions of economic, textual, theatrical, and cultural reproduction. Ranging across cultural materialism, new historicism, feminist psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, deconstruction, and theories of postmodernity, the author practices a “theory without organs”—which she provocatively calls a constructive “New Hystericism”—retheorizing the discourses of reigning methodologies as much as those in Shakespeare’s plays.