THE NEW HISTORICISM AND THE INTERPRETATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE
Keywords:
early modern period - the English Renaissance, the spectacle of power, the circulation of social energy, politics, cultural and historical contextAbstract
Concerning the English Renaissance, new historicists tried to reconstruct the everyday life of Elizabethan London from the perspective of different people`s attitudes towards customs, political and other social circumstances, all with the aim of
finding certain cultural patterns that were expressed in literature. The new historicists` analysis has shown that the poetics of the Elizabethan authorities, in its key aspects, was inextricably bound to the poetics of Shakespeare's theater. Being such, this critical practice has revealed the political events of the early modern age in England, the existence of certain ideologies and religious doctrines, which had been interwoven with dramas as a powerful means of a Renaissance man
self-fashioning. The views and analyses from the works of the most prominent new historicists, primarily Stephen Greenblatt, are a new form of perceiving the English Renaissance literature from the standpoint of relations between power, politics and other social relations and circumstances of the early modern age. One of Greenblatt`s views is that Shakespeare realized that maintaining the authority of the ruling class had not only been excercised by a mere display of force and power, but also in manipulating with a certain system of relations that were contained in literature and theater of the early modern age.
New historicists have also revealed and emphasized freedom of speech in the English Renaissance drama, which represented dissonant tones, difference, unconventional character and something quite unorthodox.In the 20th century, a post-industrial era full of contradictions, breaks with the old ideologies and tensions due to the upcoming ideas, appeared a particular interest in
the new approach to the study of Renaissance literature, and the Renaissance, as a transitional period between the Middle Ages and the Humanism, which was particularly adequate for observing and analizing the conflicts of opposing ideologies and social and historical contradictions.
