A01=Oliver Arnold
Author_Oliver Arnold
British history in literature
Category=ATD
Category=DS
Category=DSBD
Category=DSG
Category=JBCC
Early Modern Parliamentary history
Elizabethan political theory
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Jacobean political thought
Political representation
Rome in literature
Shakespeare's political plays
Theater and politics
Tudor-Stuart politics
Product details
- ISBN 9780801885044
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 07 May 2007
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The new practices and theories of parliamentary representation that emerged during Elizabeth's and James' reigns shattered the unity of human agency, redefined the nature of power, transformed the image of the body politic, and unsettled constructs and concepts as fundamental as the relation between presence and absence. In The Third Citizen, Oliver Arnold argues that recovering the formation of political representation as an effective ideology should radically change our understanding of early modern political culture, Shakespeare's political art, and the way Anglo-American critics, for whom representative democracy is second nature, construe both. In magisterial readings of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and the First Tetralogy, Arnold discovers a new Shakespeare who was neither a conservative apologist for monarchy nor a prescient, liberal champion of the House of Commons but instead a radical thinker and artist who demystified the ideology of political representation in the moment of its first flowering.
Shakespeare believed that political representation produced (and required for its reproduction) a new kind of subject and a new kind of subjectivity, and he fashioned a new kind of tragedy to represent the loss of power, the fall from dignity, the false consciousness, and the grief peculiar to the experiences of representing and of being represented. Representationalism and its subject mark the beginning of political modernity; Shakespeare's tragedies greet political representationalism with skepticism, bleakness, and despair.
Oliver Arnold is an associate professor of English at Princeton University.
