Shakespeare and the value of theatrical character
Creators: name: Coyle, Emily
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: Shakespearean character is regularly valued by its affinity with other words, with nouns like “interiority,” “individuality,” and “autonomy,” and with adjectives like “realistic,” “authentic,” and “self-same.” This dissertation interrogates the social and economic basis of the scholarly and popular attachment to Shakespearean character, locating its origins in a period of literary history where theatrical inventions were always also commercial productions. By combining the commercial lineage of Shakespearean character with materialist and feminist analysis, I contend that the qualities of personhood that are typically associated with Shakespeare’s characters are the effects of an institutional process that transforms theatrical characterization into a repository of symbolic and economic value. Character has remained a dominant category of popular and scholarly inquiry into Shakespeare, I argue, not because he had some special purchase on demonstrating human continuity—though that is often the story that gets told—but because character is value circulating in a material infrastructure: the playhouse, the publishing industry, the joint stock company, and the institutions that preside over the economies of leisure and entertainment. “Shakespeare and the Value of Theatrical Character” argues that the economic origins of playing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England gave rise to character’s formal articulations and appearances. Each of the three plays covered, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Troilus and Cressida, trace a period in Shakespeare’s theatrical career typically linked to a stylistic shift away from his contemporaries. This period also happens to track with the inception of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company for which Shakespeare began writing specific characters for specific actors, notably Richard Burbage, who is credited to having played Hamlet, Romeo, Macbeth, Brutus, Lear, and others. Rather than suggesting that these developments in characterization arise independently of their material and historical contexts—the product of Burbage’s histrionic excellence, say, or Shakespeare’s authorial ingenuity—this dissertation shows how Shakespearean characterization emerged within a theatrical industry that had to contend with already existing literary traditions, aesthetic standards, and styles of playing that commanded the dramatic possibilities of Shakespeare’s plays. Unsatisfied by criticism that marvels at Shakespeare’s ability to create fictional characters that act and behave like real persons, “Shakespeare and the Value of Theatrical Character” intervenes in these discussions to uncover an ethics and politics of characterization that is indisputably governed by the accumulative demands of exchange value. Focusing on the division of labor between male and female characters, boy actors and adult players, and onstage and off-stage action, allows us to see that what is produced by Shakespearean characterization is not a person, but the fetishistic illusion of one. The result is a dissertation that tells a story of theatrical labor and the commodification of identity critical to character’s institutional authorization.