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In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism.
Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present.
In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project.
To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon.
In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism.
Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present.
In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project.
To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon.
Margreta de Grazia is emerita Sheli Z. and Burton X.
Rosenberg Professor of the Humanities at the University of
Pennsylvania. She is the author of Shakespeare Verbatim: The
Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus and ‘Hamlet’
without Hamlet.
"There is a great deal to appreciate and to enjoy in this
theory-rich book, which moves as freely as a willful anachronism
through material across its four central essays. . . . de Grazia’s
work in particular offers so much of promise to scholars as well as
lay readers of Shakespeare that it practically ensures that the
next generation of Shakespeareans will have plenty in the way of
bardological thinking to do.”
*Times Literary Supplement*
"One takes one’s leave of Four Shakespearean Period Pieces, as
I have now done twice, with the feeling of being smarter—more
critically sophisticated—than was previously the case."
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
"This thought-provoking book investigates four interrelated
critical axioms that Margreta de Grazia regards as having set the
direction of Shakespeare scholarship and criticism since the late
eighteenth century."
*Modern Philology*
"Bold, exciting and illuminating: as energizing as any of {de
Grazia's] work. . . . de Grazia picks apart our foundational
assumptions about the constituted parameters of Shakespeare
studies."
*Shakespeare Studies*
"The eloquent and lucid analysis in this volume will be of interest
to Shakespeare scholars of all stripes. Each essay stands on its
own but also connects thematically with the work as a whole, and
its arguments are intelligent and learned. Readers familiar with de
Grazia's oeuvre will recognize overlaps with themes covered in her
earlier work . . . but the questions and concerns here are
developed in a new and characteristically sophisticated
fashion. Four Shakespearean Period Pieces invites us to
sit with the moments in which time in and around Shakespeare feel
out of joint, and to think through what these moments might mean
for our own practices as literary scholars. In this sense, this
work could not be more timely."
*Renaissance Quarterly*
“Perhaps de Grazia’s most accessible book to date… A brilliant bit
of writing with important implications for the practices at the
core of Shakespeare studies.”
*Come to the Pedlar*
“The originality and importance of Four Shakespearean Period
Pieces excites my enormous interest and admiration. Teasing out the
origin and intention of terms that have been central to discussions
of Shakespeare, de Grazia discloses a tangle of problems,
misleading assumptions, blind confidence, and distortion. An
exercise of scholarly demolition, at once relentless, resourceful,
and cunning, this book will shake the grand house of literary
criticism.”
*Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University*
“Four Shakespearean Period Pieces is wonderful. Lucid,
original, learned, and readable, it forms a pendant to de Grazia’s
foundational work. She returns to the penetratingly smart
intellectual and disciplinary history that she has made her own,
surveying centuries of scholarship with powerful clarity. The
scholarship is deep, authoritative, and approachable, moving from
Augustine to Heidegger with brilliant accessibility. Her critical
readings are revelatory, zinging with insight and larger
intellectual context, and reverberating with ongoing challenges for
humanistic scholarship in our own times.”
*Emma Smith, University of Oxford*
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