Between Historicism and Presentism: Love and Service in Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest

Abstract

For at least five years Shakespeare studies have found themselves in the doldrums. The excitement offered by the initial (and belated) injection of theory some twenty years ago has waned, as Renaissance studies in general, and scholarship devoted to Shakespeare in particular, settled into a “new” historicism that has entrenched itself as the predominant way of reading early modern texts. There is, I believe, a pragmatic, institutional explanation for the hegemony of historicism, which also accounts for the difficulty scholars and critics have found in breaking into a new paradigm. For at least five years, the Shakespeare Association of America – probably the largest institution devoted to Shakespeare and his contemporaries – has had at least one lecture panel or seminar on the programme of its annual conference devoted to the question of the limits of historicism and the possibilities of moving beyond it. At one of the seminars a prominent Shakespeare scholar bemoaned the fact that it was almost impossible to be published in the major
journals unless one's work had a distinctly historicist bias.

Shakespeare in Southern Africa Vol. 17 2005: pp. 1-18