Walter Cohen

The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford edition

Instructors and students worldwide welcomed the fresh scholarship, lively and accessible introductions, helpful marginal glosses and notes, readable single-column format, all designed in support of the goal of the Oxford text: to bring the modern reader closer than before possible to Shakespeares plays as they were first acted. Now, under Stephen Greenblatts direction, the editors have considered afresh each introduction and all of the apparatus to make the Second Edition an even better teaching tool.

The Literature of Empire in the Renaissance

ç 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2004/10201-0001

Intrigue Tragedy in Renaissance England and Spain

10.00 A generation ago, the title I have chosen for this essay would have been understood as a challenge to prevailing critical sentiment. Today, it arguably retains its original force only in relationship to public discussion of contemporary American foreign policy and the heritage of European global domination that the United States continues. For the very different audience of academic literary criticism, however, the topic will seem heterodox, ironically, only to the extent that it clings to terms like “literature” and “the Renaissance”—language that will to some seem outmoded or worse. But even if these antidisciplinary and anti-high-cultural tendencies are ignored, one still confronts a relatively recent anti-imperialist orthodoxy. That orthodoxy poses at least two problems. First, opposition to the genocidal destruction of the indigenous American population as well as to the mass enslavement and murder of Africans does not require a refined ethical or critical sensibility. Repetition can quickly set in. Second, the sheer increase in the volume and range of valuable work associated with contemporary accounts of early modern expansion has made it ever more difficult to bring the relationship between literature and empire into focus. That is one of the functions of scholarship—to undermine easy interpretations resting on thin empirical bases. My aim therefore is to develop a series of simplifying hypotheses while nonetheless keeping faith with the complexity of the material as we now understand it. I argue that imperialism in general and American imperialism in particular are decisive for certain features long recognized in Renaissance literature but not otherwise adequately explicable. I try to illustrate The Literature of Empire in the Renaissance

Calderon in England: A Social Theory of Production and Consumption

the magical names of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Each playwright combined extraordinary verbal and stylistic range with a violation of neoclassical norms; each displayed a profound interest in the fate of the nation, manifest not only in the symptomatic mingling of kings and commoners but also in the recurrent recourse to the genre of the national history play itself; each wrote for the commercial public theaters that emerged in the late sixteenth century and soon focused theatrical activity on the capital cities of London and Madrid; each thrived under the sway of a partially centralized monarchy. These parallels might be considerably extended, and they might be, and indeed often have been, generalized to suggest the unique similarities between the Spanish and English theaters in the age of the Renaissance. Yet the resemblances can be overstated, not only because the two countries differed from one another, but also because what they had in common they also shared as well with the rest of Europe. Such is the case with intrigue tragedy, a genre that came into its own in England between 1609 and 1 6 1 4 and in Spain between 1622 and

Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain.

A social theory of production and consumption clarifies the dialectical relationship of the genesis, structure, and impact of Calderóns plays. The masterpieces of the 1630s emerged from a period of crisis that was roughly duplicated in Shakespearean England of the early seventeenth century. Calderón influenced British literature most powerfully during the Restoration, when trivialized versions of his comedias de capa y espada appealed to aristocrats returning to power after exile on the continent during the Civil War decades. Much later, Shelley felt significant affinities with Calderón, identifying with the rebelliousness of El mágico prodigioso in a manner which enables us to understand that play as a response to the problems of Habsburg absolutism. Since the 1930s, the British Hispanists have seen in Calderóns drama an attractive expression of their own conservative views. On the other hand, the Marxian approach adopted here would link Calderón and his age to the present by stressing the political malaise common to both eras. (WC)