University of Chicago Press Four Shakespearean Period Pieces

In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism. Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present. In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project. To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon. Review " Four Shakespearean Period Pieces is wonderful. Lucid, original, learned, and readable, it forms a pendant to de Grazia's foundational work. She returns to the penetratingly smart intellectual and disciplinary history that she has made her own, surveying centuries of scholarship with powerful clarity. The scholarship is deep, authoritative, and approachable, moving from Augustine to Heidegger with brilliant accessibility. Her critical readings are revelatory, zinging with insight and larger intellectual context, and reverberating with ongoing challenges for humanistic scholarship in our own times."--Emma Smith, University of Oxford "The originality and importance of Four Shakespearean Period Pieces excites my enormous interest and admiration. Teasing out the origin and intention of terms that have been central to discussions of Shakespeare, de Grazia discloses a tangle of problems, misleading assumptions, blind confidence, and distortion. An exercise of scholarly demolition, at once relentless, resourceful, and cunning, this book will shake the grand house of literary criticism."--Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University About the Author Margreta de Grazia is emerita Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Professor of the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus and ‘Hamlet’ without Hamlet.