Political Aspects of Shakespeare’s History Plays: Modernist and Postmodernist Readings in a ’Conflict of Interpretations’

Abstract

This paper analyzes different approaches to the political contents of Shakespeare’s history plays in the modernist and the postmodernist theoretical framework. While the modernist critics were undoubtedly aware of the complex political strategies transposed in drama, they mostly tended to analyze the presupposed dominant features of the Elizabethan ‘discursive formation’. Postmodernist approaches to the history plays, within a wide theoretical scope which includes deconstruction, new historicism, cultural materialism, feminist criticism, Bakhtinian criticism and psychoanalysis, express a more skeptical attitude in interpreting political contents and emphasize different instances of implied marginal and subversive meanings in the history plays. It is argued that the hermeneutical concept of the ‘conflict of interpretations’ developed by Paul Ricoeur in De l’interprétation: essai sur Freud (1965) has its special instance in the understanding of the political aspects of Shakespeare’s history plays in the twentieth century.
A special attention is paid to the most recent postmodernist approach, which has been emerging under the name of presentism. It tends to relate the political contents of the plays to the political context of their twenty-first century critics/ readers/spectators.