Compounding Errors | Ii
II
One recent critic who has sought to address the Elizabethan theatre in this way as an active site of cultural reflection in the moment of performance is Louis A. Montrose. Seeking what he calls "a Shakespearean anthropology," Montrose surveys sixteenth-century English history, emphasizing a galloping disequilibrium and a burgeoning anxiety among a bourgeoisie increasingly unsure of its bearings. From this, Montrose proposes that the Elizabethan theatre became a self-conscious site of surrogate ritual in a world whose reassuring solidity of symbolic practice was being eroded: "I am suggesting . . . that the public theatre absorbs some vital functions of ritual within Shakespeare's society. These functions are not adequately performed by more central and officially sanctioned institutions, and are in some ways inimical to them."16 This is an exhilarating vista, yet so much remains unspoken as to give one pause. The assertion that Shakespeare's theatre...
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