HISTORICIZING THE CULTURAL CONTEXT IN SELECTED PLAYS BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Abstract

In his Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986), Northrop Frye enunciates an idea of a two-phased Shakespeare: "one is the historical side, where he's one of a group of dramatists working in Elizabethan London and writing plays for an audience living in that London at that time" while the other one is "the poet who speaks to us today with so powerfully contemporary a voice" (1, italics mine). Harping upon the historicaVcontemporary Shakespeare assumption, Frye adds: "If we study only the historical, or 1564-1616 Shakespeare, we take away all his relevance to our own time" (1). Explaining what is meant by the word 'contemporary', Jan Kott argues:

It is some kind of relationship between two times, one on the stage and the other off it. One is the time inhabited by the actors, the other is the time inhabited by the audience. The relationship between those two times is what finally establishes whether Shakespeare is considered to be a contemporary or not. When the two times are closely connected, then Shakespeare is our contemporary (12).

In his, Hamlet Versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art (1993), R.A. Foakes states that Shakespeare's "universal genius established him as a figure of enormous cultural authority" (12). He proceeds to argue that his genius "penetrated into the depths of human consciousness" (12) mainly because of his portrayal ofHamlet's character who "reflected everyman, since 'it is because Hamlet is eternally human that the play retains its lasting hold on our sympathies. We are all potential Hamlets" (13). Shakespeare's critics, in Foakes's view, identify themselves with Hamlet because he becomes "a free-floating signifier, taking on the subjectivity of the critic, and typically reflecting his