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)

"Unlike other memorial volumes, the First Folio defers identifying details about the author until he has been established as transcendent." (23)

pages containing list of actors and some dedicatory poems are "floaters, with no fixed place in the volume" (24) -- but always seem to not fit in; "Once again, the FF resists localization. The elements that seem most immediate in terms fo their evocation of the author as a man who existed at a definite time and as part of a specific cultural milieu are out of place, as though alien to the transcendent image of Shakespeare that Jonson's poem constructs." (24)

"The Bard generated by the FF is a figure for Art itself as Renaissance humanists like Ben Jonson wished to imagine it, existing in lofty separateness from the vicissitudes of life, yet capable, from its eminence, of shedding influence, 'cheere,' and admonition." (24)

"The usual folio volume encouraged readers to perceive continuities between 'local' particularities about the author and the ghiher and more generalized realm of fame and permanence to which the author laid claim through the work: the author was both 'local' and transcendent. The FF disrupts the perception of such continuities. It makes high claims for 'The AUThor' while simulataneously dispersing authorial identity, so that 'Mr. William Shakespeare' becomes almost an abstraction, a generic category, while remaining an unstable composite. Given the rhetorical turbulence of the volume's introductory materials, constructing Shakespeare requires almost a leap of faith, like Jonson's, and depends upon the suppression of a host of particularities that recede into indeterminacy when an attempt is made to pin them down. If we insist upon clinging to such ephemera, the volume seems to tell us, we will lose the 'essence' of Shakespeare and fragment the unstable, generalized figure that the First Folio constructs. Then there will be no Shakespeare after all. That is a very powerful inducement against localization -- at least if authorial identity is something we wish to value." (24-5)

FF valorizes the general; this reverses what Ren audiences brought to the theatre (26) -- "Plays were caught up in a whirl of intense if nebulous topical speculation in which meaning was multiple, radically unfixed, but also capable of settling into termporary fixity as a result of interpretation. (28)

"In the FF, the plays are covered by a humanist overlay that protects them against the marauding inroads of irresponsible interpretation. As in other 'authored' works of the late Renaissance, there is an implicit contract between writer and readers, or in this case between the volume's compilers and readers, governing the terms in which the contents may be read." (30)

"The FF gives readers two choices: either we must accept the transcendent Shakespeare, or there will be no Shakespeare at all, only an untidy pile of fragments that cannot be assembled." (32)