Marcus 1988

Marcus, Leah. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Localization

"Even though every interpreter of Shakespeare depends on the work of previous 'localizers' for such basic things as determining the order of the plays' composition and establishing the texts in which we read them, we have tended to set such work apart from the mainstream, as though by assigning the localizers to a fenced-in preserve we can minimize their impact on something we are willing to perceive only as universal and without limits." (1)

Shakespeare frontispiece

"At a time when English writers were asserting unprecedented autonomy and mastery over their own work through allegorical frontispieces, admonitory prefaces, overt and covert declarations of intent, Jonson's poem abolishes Shakespeare as an entity apart from his writings. What the authoer may have intended becomes void as a category because there is no space at all between the man and his work. Andrewes and other authors may gesture toward their books, but Shakespeare is the book." (19)

"The First Folio opens with an implicit promise to communicate an authorial identity, which it instead repeatedly displaces: Shakespeare is somehow there, but nowhere definitively there." (20)

"Shakespeare, as presented through the rhetorical anomalies of the First Folio, is an author who is simultaneously not an author in the proprietary sense that contemporaries were beginning to claim for themselves. As the volume sloughs off devices that would 'localize' the author's identity, so it resists the creation of a localized audience. The comely frontispiece of the late Renaissance was like a veil covering a book's contents and preserving it from vulgar eyes: only those learned enough to 'read' the book's visual schematization on the title page had earned the right to enter the text itself. Elaborate engraved frontispieces thus served contemporary authors as a way of preselcting their audience, or at least of favoring some segment of it." (21)

"There was a tension, often quite explicit in these volumes, between the intellectual elitism claimed for authorship and the broader appeal required if authorship were to prosper in the marketplace. Shakespeare's First Folio addresses the claim of elitism by appearing not to do so. The title page, unlike the usual engraved frontispiece, offers no obvious barriers against perusal by the unlearned." (21)