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critiques, of Hamlet’s sadistic postponement of revenge until he can ‘trip him that his heels may kick at heaven’ [ Hamlet, 3,4,93 ]. As Margreta de Grazia writes, the question ‘great minds have been asking’ for centuries is ‘How could this diabolic desire be reconciled with the nobility and decency of Hamlet’s character?’ But the analogy with his Prince of Hesitation also associates Shakespeare
early modern studies in recent years, exemplified by critics such as David Kastan, Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia. A critique of the presuppositions of this movement might usefully begin precisely from this moment in de Man. 21 Aristotle, Rhetoric , trans. W. Rhys Roberts, in Complete
, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 ); Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991 ). 7 For a short history of such ‘Negative Capability’, mentioning the commentators cited, as well as discussion of textual and performance criticism
situate and contest existing contemporary cultural norms concerning truth, value and meaning it follows that, just as Shakespeare becomes aesthetical, he becomes political and contentious too. So that as Margreta de Grazia observes, the playwright’s work is central to: the neo-classical critical tradition of determining Beauties and Faults, an exercise that required and refined the generally interchangeable faculties of Taste, Judgement and Reason. Analysis of an author’s Beauties and Faults (Excellencies and Blemishes) involved major critical issues, the rivalry
early biographical reading of the first few lines of The Merry Wives of Windsor , in which Shakespeare puns on Sir Thomas Lucy’s name in a scene partly about deer-poaching. Margreta de Grazia notes that ‘the anecdotes are less a form of biography than of literary criticism: they record not the life Shakespeare lived between 1564 and 1616 but the impression his works made after his death’ (De Grazia
Simmes] for N[icholas Ling] and John Trundell, 1603; STC 22275), sig. F2r–v. My thanks to Katherine Duncan-Jones for discussing this passage with me. 3 Margreta De Grazia notes that all four jokes ‘give vent to the unsatisfactory conditions of his employment.’ See
For a lively re-examination of anthropomorphism, see also Lorraine Daston and Greg Mitman (eds), Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 3 See especially Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 4 I draw upon Hodder, Entangled, pp. 4– 5. Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004). 5 See, for example, Margreta De Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (eds), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Literary Genealogy’, Modern Philology , 91 (1993), 1–25. 20 Louis Montrose, ‘Spenser’s Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, and the Early Modern Subject’, in Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (ed.), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 83–130 (p. 97). 21 Montrose initially acknowledges that the volume is a poetic miscellany, introducing it as ‘[a poetry book] containing Colin Clouts Come Home Againe , as well as Astrophel and other
implicitly balances Spenser’s official duties as Sheriff of Cork against the poetic industry which has produced this poem and volume. We understand that Ralegh has rebuked Spenser for neglecting the former; Spenser’s reply contends that what he has been doing instead 1 Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Spenser’s Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, and the Early Modern Subject’, in Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (eds), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). MUP_Pugh_SpencerandVIrgil_Printer2.indd 225
discussion of Harold Jenkins (ed.), Hamlet , The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd ser. (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 89–96, who concludes that the question is unanswerable (p. 96). Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (eds), Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623 , The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), pp. 66–77, remain cautious (Shakespeare ‘may possibly have read’, ‘may have known’, ‘may have read Belleforest in French’). Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), prefers to conjecture that he read the English