The physics of *presence, the metaphysics of materiality: Shakespeare and the criticism of presentation

Shakespeare studies has tended toward a "division of labor" that assigns the language of the plays to literary critics and all other elements of the plays to theater history or performance studies. This division has only been reinforced by Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence, a compelling philosophical analysis that associates the idea of "presence" with a naive metaphysics. These trends have skewed the understanding of the language of the plays toward the literary, promoting their appreciation through close reading and the other methods of literary analysis. In doing so, much of the performative nature of the language has been elided. This dissertation seeks to retrieve an understanding of the language of the plays in performance by first recuperating the term "presence" as a critically viable category of analysis, considering the theoretical milieu in which Shakespeare studies have taken place over the past several decades. By understanding the importance placed on the idea of "signification," it is possible to undo the hermeneutic circle that Derrida's critique has both pointed out and reinforced, wherein all language is already "writing." Wittgenstein's late writings offer a way out of this cycle, viewing language not as a rigid system of signification but more generally as "behavior." Using a Wittgensteinian sensibility, I propose (and demonstrate) a criticism of the plays that focuses less on strict representational strategies and instead embraces the "presentational" aspects of the language and the ways in which the presentational and representational valences are both separate and complementary.