ABSTRACT
Character is the great discovery of eighteenth-century interpretation and criticism of Shakespeare’s plays. Or-maybe it’s just a dreadful mistake. When Shakespeare’s plays were first written, performed, read, and seen by audiences the make-believe people who populated his stories were not called “characters.” Most often they were referred to in published texts as “persons of the drama.” At the same time the word character was used mainly to signify visible distinguishing marks of some kind, specifically handwriting (Goldberg 7ff.). These facts have suggested to some observers that analysis of characters in Shakespeare is somehow erroneous, although Jonathan Goldberg has shown that the relationship between textual marks and fictional personalities is actually very complex and entirely salient. Even so, focus on character simply reflects “the consensual orthodoxy of the west,” in its concern for the fate of the bourgeois subject (Belsey ix). On this account the focus on character to the exclusion of other considerations is not just an innocent mistake, but rather a deliberate and fraudulent misappropriation of Shakespeare’s plays for the ideological purposes of bourgeois society. In its developed form the argument is certainly an important one, but even so it fails to do any kind of justice to the aims and the achievements of eighteenth-century character-based criticism.
