Infinite gesture: An approach to Shakespearean character.

摘要

In this dissertation I develop and theorize an approach to Shakespearean character. I focus on the ways in which characters talk about knowing others and being known; in other words, this is an approach to characters who are themselves approaching characters. The plays I treat in detail are Coriolanus and Hamlet. The words characters in these plays use when they explain their decisions, avoid explaining their decisions, talk about others' decisions, or try to expose others' secrets, are often position-and-movement words. I argue that characters use for these purposes words related by wordplay to the postures and gestures involved in crucial rituals (the "custom of request" in Coriolanus, the fencing match in Hamlet). At the same time, this is a metacritical project: I deal with approaches and attitudes of Shakespeare interpreters. How do we stand in relation to each other? How do editors and critics echo and transform the characters' postural/gestural language, and what are the implications of these echoes and transformations? Why is it worthwhile to work toward awareness of these echoes and transformations? In an extensive introductory section I theorize the kind of reading practiced here as an ethical practice-a practice intended to modify what Michel Foucault calls the rapport a soi.; The project's main original contribution is its way of re-conceiving the relationships among several currents in Shakespeare studies. My discussion engages with recent work in textual studies. Examples include work by Leah Marcus and Paul Werstine. It also engages with historically informed treatments of wordplay. Examples include work by Margreta de Grazia and Patricia Parker. And it addresses work that could be said to be part of a move in the field toward "ethical criticism." Examples include work by Stanley Cavell and John Guillory. As well, my discussion engages with psychoanalytic criticism by Marjorie Garber, Coppelia Kahn, and others. While I do not consider myself a psychoanalytic critic, the affinity my approach has with psychoanalysis has to do with my interest in making explicit some of the implications of unreflectively chosen metaphors, word associations, etc. The implications that concern me most are those that have to do with the ways interpreters relate to each other.