ABSTRACT
In Retheorizing Shakespeare, I argue (1) that the most sweeping change that has taken place in literary studies over the past generation, the displacement of close reading by historicist inquiry, has been founded on a shift from a poetics of irony to a poetics of the sublime; (2) that the modern theatrical models of these competing poetics are Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theatre” (BOT 22) and Stephen Greenblatt’s “absolutist theatricality” (SN 65); and (3) that the adoption of a performative model of close reading that incorporates the defamiliarizing techniques of Brecht’s alienation-eff ect1 and of poststructuralist theory is the most productive way to rediscover Shakespeare not simply as a site of cultural complexity but as an active cultural interrogator in his own right. While Greenblatt’s conception of “absolutist theatricality” is ultimately based on an aristotelian poetics of magnitude and inevitability, the Brechtian technique of alienation, or “playing in quotation marks,” contests the claims of aristotelian poetics to represent the “eternal laws of the theatre” (BOT 17, 161). Brecht’s challenge to Aristotle begins at the level of representation and extends into a disagreement over the purpose of theatre. Aristotle draws upon the distinction between narrative and dramatic representation in order to argue for the superiority of dramatic representation that is based on the “natural instinct of imitation,”2 but Brecht’s decision to name his theatre epische, or “narrative,” contests the natural grounding of mimesis by emphasizing the infl ectional, rather than the iterative, properties of representation. In epic theatre, as mimesis is framed by narrative, the “laws of probability or necessity” (Poetics 12) revealed in aristotelian drama lose their aura of inevitability and are displayed as contingent constructions. In aesthetic theory, the name for the contingent, mimetic formation that Aristotle presents as natural, grand, and inevitable is the sublime. As Kant’s articulation of the concept of the sublime shows, when an encounter between subjectivity and the totality of nature is framed by the synthetic concept of the sublime, it becomes possible to totalize alterity and thus provide self-knowledge for a subject who is able to recognize herself in her diff erence from a grand but
fi nite Other.3 Aristotle and Kant posit this recognition of natural laws as the summit of human awareness, but Brecht’s demand that theatre should reveal the fabricated nature of representation is designed to fulfi ll Marx’s injunction to the philosophers: the point is not simply to interpret the world, but to change it.4
