The Politics and Political Aesthetics of Shakespeare's (Re)Sources

Abstract

Abstract

en Shakespearean source study is not usually associated with any political dimension. Can a choice or preference among possible sources be a political act? This does not seem to be the case in modern academic professionalization, as the objectivizing policy statements of leading researchers show. We need to look more closely at current thinking about the object of political inquiry, as the way one thinks of the political dimension requires a choice between competing paradigms. From this scrutiny, we can ask whether the study of Shakespeare's sources has always been as innocent of political acts as the practice and the policy statements of researchers in our time suggest. In the earlier 19th century, attention was given to folktale sources which partly originated outside Europe, even in Africa. Are they represented by dominating Western frameworks? In our time, source study emerges as informed by a political ideology operating through an aesthetic system. Yet when we consider textualities that travel rhizomically and orally, we can recognize how these offer impulses for decolonizing Shakespeare studies in a politics of otherness, overcoming the twin focus on European literary history and on writing or print. Now that Yoruba myth is being explored as a resource for Shakespeare, there is scope for fresh studies of his dramatic work against early African textualities.