Post-colonial Shakespeare: Fictions of self, fictions of others

The discovery of the New World is negotiated and consumed by the Renaissance stage in the form of exotic and marvelous stories about strangers who are simultaneously familiar and alien. The Shakespearean plays examined by this study: Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello, present the construction, consumption, and popularization of such stories. They, in turn, function as material for new generations of playwrights and readers in cultures remote from, but familiar with, Renaissance England. Decades later, Thomas Southerne looks to Shakespeare's Othello and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko to write his play, Oroonoko, about an exotic stranger. This study examines the transformations from Titus Andronicus, to Othello, to Oroonoko. As readers, scholars, and audiences, we are critical consumers of these tales, which continue to constitute valuable self and cultural knowledge. Thus on the simplest and most complex levels, understanding the self is dependent on a familiarity with fictions of racial and gendered others.;While a number of critical texts examine how the worlds of the plays scapegoat the stranger within, they present perceptions of the other as always in the service of power interests. This study argues for the imaginative potential of the plays because readers, like audiences, identify with and rehearse the possibilities inherent in the experiences being dramatized. Since no reader perfectly occupies the space accorded to the nominal and ideal reader, the play's meaning is both constructed and simultaneously deconstructed.;A Renaissance pedagogy of exemplarity suggests both emulation and parody. The stage is particularly conducive to parodic encounters as when Miranda's meeting with the shipwrecked wedding party in The Tempest inverts Europe's encounter with the Americas. Even beyond the Renaissance, the instituted study of Shakespeare in Britain, in colonies like India, and in America, assert that the plays served an ideological purpose, particularly when they presented fictions of the self as fictions of others. This study, Post-Colonial Shakespeare, recognizes the new potential of these texts.