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conforms to the distorted archetype of Jewishness and is punished for it. 34 Terry Eagleton notes that the play presents a contrast of archaic Old Testament juridical observance with New Testament ideals of love, forgiveness and tolerance. 35 However, Drakakis goes on to describe Merchant as a ‘challenge to identity politics’ that ‘confront[s] western Christian
. Unlike other Shakespeare plays, there has been no seismic shift in Caesar ’s stage history, no new reading or production innovation which has transformed the play entirely in the theatre. It is not a natural magnet for the identity politics of race and gender which have been at the heart of many radical rethinkings of Shakespeare’s other plays, nor has critical opinion of the play’s core issues altered
In classical descriptions, Persians and their rulers are seen as being given to both tyranny and femininity; early modern Europe thus inherited a view of Persia in which the performance of religious identity, political power and gender were inter-connected. Given the complex relationships between Islam, tyranny and gender, early modern European interest in the possible religious conversion of Persia and its people marks a moment at which contemporary anxieties about religious and gender identities converge. This chapter argues that European writers’ interest in the prospect of Persian conversion became tied up with their ideas about the links between Persian effeminacy and tyranny. The prospect of the conversion of Persian Shahs in early modern travel literature and drama gives rise to particular anxieties about masculinity, both in Persian figures and in the Christian European travellers and dramatists who portrayed them. Despite the tradition of viewing Persia as feminised and luxurious, the sources betray an underlying concern that Muslims’ gender and religious identities might in fact be more ‘fixed’ than those of Christian travellers, who experienced their own conversions to Islam and to Persian identities in ways that were troubling to them both as Christians and as men.
Writing about relations between the English national poet and Scotland at the start of the twenty-first century will inevitably be shaped by the developments of the 1990s: the rise of nationalisms throughout Europe and the flourishing of identity politics, the academic debate about the British problem, and in the political sphere the devolution of government within the British state
discussed above, the 1601 will and accompanying inventory anticipated and for a short period of time participated in a future moment of death. The will shows evidence in marginalia, additional codicils and a final nuncupative statement of intention, that this moment was revisited again and again. These revisitations brought the material again into view, into a hyper-presence. Those object actors that generally silently mediated social relations, identities, political structures and the routines of daily life that maintained these became visible. One of the codicils
points, yesterday’s scholarship, liberal-progressive identity politics, and a double invocation of cultural philanthropy and commercial nous, the programme for this As You Like It concisely articulated both the production’s and the RSC’s position in the 1980s theatrical marketplace. Moment by moment, and scene by scene, the production was visually striking, and, in this respect at least, consistently