“Bit[ing] the Law by the Nose”: Shakespeare’s Revisions of Fear and Punishment
This article focuses on the dialectics of fear and punishment in four plays by Shakespeare written in the wake of either the Main Plot (1603) or the Gunpowder Plot (1606): Measure for Measure, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. It asks what Shakespeare’s dramaturgy does with fear and to f...
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| izdano v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
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Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare
2018
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| Online dostop: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Izvleček: | This article focuses on the dialectics of fear and punishment in four plays by Shakespeare written in the wake of either the Main Plot (1603) or the Gunpowder Plot (1606): Measure for Measure, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. It asks what Shakespeare’s dramaturgy does with fear and to fear, using a variety of critical approaches that yield different responses to this question. The Foucauldian emphasis on the mechanics of the exercise of power and the awesome display of chastised bodies tends to by-pass the examination of fear as a mood and experience of the punished trespasser, considering it instead as an instrument put to the service of the body politic. Hegel’s distinction between two types of fear, the fear of the penal code or moral law, and a deeper fear of oneself or “fate as punishment,” enables us to probe deeper into the experience of fear, the moral imagination, and the process leading from fear and punishment to a greater degree of self-consciousness. This paper argues, however, that the implications of Shakespeare’s dramatic treatment of fear are best understood when read in light of early modern theological literature and its attempts to finely rationalize the experience of fear. Shakespeare’s plays dramatize a contemporary typology of fear, undermining beliefs in a “native punishment” (Henry V) and “God’s law”, better to show how the (supposed) trespassers are in fact the reflectors of the executors’ fears. |
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