The Unmasking of Drama: Contested Representation in Shakespeare's Tragedies

In the theater, literature's capacity for
representation seems extended; the degree of "standing for" heightened. In The Unmasking of Drama, Jonathan Baldo examines the remarkable representative power with which viewers invest Shakespearean theater, contending that struggles over representation constitute one of the greatest dramas within Shakespearean drama.

From Hamlet to Coriolanus and Timon of Athens, Shakespeare's tragedies constitute the most strenuous attempts within English
Renaissance tragedy to unmask its presentational practices and to penetrate its own ordering principles. Baldo evaluates the
theater's economical means of representation, its heavy reliance on the authority of generalizing, and its assumption of a translatability between visual and verbal
signs. He discovers that those modes of
representation echo Renaissance assumptions about political representation, and as a result, Shakespearean drama's self-investigations bear powerful political implications. In many of Shakespeare's plays may be read the demise of an older, corporeal concept of representation tied to the body and visibility and tentative steps toward a new concept of representation, one that will be tied to the rise of parliamentary government.

This study reveals the flaws within the widespread assumption that Shakespeare's
plays possess an almost limitless capacity to
represent, to speak on behalf of subsequent
generations and other cultures. Baldo shows
that one of the great ironies of such a "universalist" Shakespeare is that Shakespearean drama itself challenges the Renaissance era's dominant ideas about representation: for instance, the assumption that a single body, a monarch, can represent an entire people. Paradoxically, to many, Shakespeare fulfills the very function that none of his monarchs can.

Jonathan Baldo is an associate professor of English at Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.