| The dissertation explores Shakespearean representations of subjectivity. I investigate how Shakespeare's text anticipates contemporary discourses of the divided subject, divided in terms of gender and sexuality, a subject “cut off” from himself by the forms of castration and by the unconscious. My first two chapters look at specific plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet, investigating how these dramas stage desire via the subject's shaping phantasies of the other, also considering the poetic subject's implication in this “other” at scenes of identification. My title also speaks to the idea that the Shakespearean text is a precursor to Freudian and Lacanian theories of the divided subject, providing an important field of reference in which psychoanalysis will recognize and elaborate itself as theory. The use of psychoanalytic theory as a method for reading Shakespeare's text is complicated, then, by my claim that this Renaissance dramatist invents a type of literary subjectivity we can call “Shakespearean.” One result is a deprivileging of psychoanalysis as a master discourse. Read from the position of Shakespearean drama, this discourse is implicated in its critical object by its shaping phantasies of gender puissance and its participation, wily nilly, in a punitive gender ideology. With Harold Bloom, Joel Fineman, and Marjorie Garber as among my critical precursors here, my argument fleshes out their contention that psychoanalysis, rather than being an ahistorical or anachronistic methodology for studying Renaissance texts, is a repetition and elaboration of the Shakespearean vision, a Shakespeare that “writes” Freud.; Working from the Shakespearean text outwards, this study of “Shakespearean subjectivity” investigates intersubjective relations between the dramatic characters, between the characters and audience, between the text and critic, and in the third chapter, imaginary relations between the author and his literary rival at a scene of writing, and between the phantasied author and the critic. I find in the Shakespearean text an exemplary theoretical understanding of desire and misrecognition operating in these relations, arguing that Shakespeare's text presents us with meditations on specular or theatrical, ideological and sacrificial misprision. By locating my critical methodology in the Shakespearean text (for example, when I look at desire or the spectator's misprision), meshing my object of inquiry with my methodology, I grant the inquiry a certain integrity while also negotiating for a “Shakespearean” authorization of my arguments. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
