Research work · 2016
The picture of Nobody
Richard M. S. Wilson
Manchester University Press eBooks
Abstract
William Shakespeare span many sad stories about the 'bare/ruin'd choirs' and 'thorny point of bare distress', caused by England's textile-driven capitalist revolution. Historian Paul Veyne likens Shakespeare to Michel Foucault for his 'sceptic renouncement' of a self- presence that would make sense of the world. Shakespeare was, not the first to pathologize the infuriating silence of the 'Spartan dog' who hides himself behind impenetrable lies, as Katharine Eisaman Maus demonstrates in her study of interiority. The physical act of kneeling embodies the paradoxical power of weakness for Shakespeare. The old legal figment of Nobody, a subject without an identity, was much on Shakespeare's mind as an Odyssean figure for the disavowal of subjective authorial responsibility, recent critics show. Shakespeare was the author of his own authorship, who produced himself as the 'subject of his own creation'.