Breaking the Illusion of Being: Shakespeare and the Performance of Self | Emily C. Bartels, Rutgers University
Emily C. Bartels, Rutgers University
Subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?
—Richard II 3.2.176-77
I
"To be or not to be" (3. 1. 55)—that is the question Hamlet asks of himself and Shakespeare asks of him and other self-scrutinizing figures like him (such as Othello, Lear, to some degree Cleopatra and Macbeth), figures emerging largely, though not solely, in the tragedies, where the idea of selfhood and the prospects of self-determination are most prominently at issue.1 New historicism, with its Foucauldian emphases on the coercive pervasion of "power" and the ideological overdetermination of identity, has brought us back, perhaps despite itself, to where early feminisms, with their interest in recovering muted female voices, began: to questions of agency, of the subject's power over and as a self.2 Given a world in which...
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