max theodore’s Reviews > Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare > Status Update

i cannot believe linda charnes and i convergently and separately evolved the hamlet cleopatra theorem of "does the interior self exist in this play" except she used helen as the other end of the line where i used cleopatra

on t&c:
“Cressida must bear the awareness that every step she takes toward Troilus seals her ‘fate’ as an artifact ... Her life is not only already over, but already written about, and repeatedly at that ... What she feels for Troilus is always contaminated by her knowledge of the future moment of betrayal.” ARGH!

“Cleopatra understands that the powerful attraction she holds for Antony depends on the extent to which their life together disrupts the role he is required to play in the imperious Roman master narrative” OKAYYYYYYY. THROWING UP!

guys i think the practice reading theory texts worked i feel so much less baffled by this than i did two years ago

i think at a generous estimate i am understanding 60% of this. but i'm doing this for YOU richard iii

sorry for updating this once every page but charnes keeps saying shit like “legendary figures—at least in Shakespeare but perhaps even more generally—are necessary precisely to overcome contestation in versions of history, as a way of consolidating the hegemony of particular interests” and my brain is spinning

"like streakers across the stage of their own legends" unreal phrase

"What gives these plays their extraordinary power [...] is the way the playwright builds his own representational difficulties with these overdetermined stories and figures into the plays themselves. Rather than trying to make these figures 'new' to an audience that 'knows' them only too well, Shakespeare's strategy is to portray their desire, and inability, to be new even to themselves..."

"For a legend is a cultural product which depends upon the naturalizing or 'forgetting' of its own history as a manufactured thing."

"Richard III, Troilus & Cressida, & Antony & Cleopatra are legendary figures... long before Shakespeare takes up the task of giving them life on the stage. But when he does, he seems concerned less to merely reproduce cultural mythology than to demonstrate... what it is like to be subjected to and by the extraordinary determining force of infamous names."