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Representation and Performance: The Uses of Authority in Shakespeare's Theater

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Robert Weimann
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Abstract

The twentieth century has witnessed a crumbling not just of diverse types of authority but of the social and intellectual foundations on which the very idea of authority is built. This “crisis of authority” needs to be viewed in historical perspective. Ever since the Protestant Reformation, attempts have been made to internalize authority, “to shift the basis of its verification from external and public modes to internal and private ones” (Harris 1). This controversial shifting of credentials is connected to a comparable change in the representational forms and functions of authorizing discourse. The increasingly uncertain premises of representation, especially its ambivalence as a mode of linguistic and cultural organization, appear to have much to do with the “present confusion” of authority (Arendt 95). Since many voices have been raised against representation, there is little need to document the intellectual disaffection it has produced, except to recall what, in our context, is the most characteristic charge of all: namely, that the much deplored power of representation to order and to command language and to impose on it “the imperious unity of Discourse” (Foucault 386) forces on us an incompatible link between language and humankind.

Type
2. Underwriting Performance: Appropriation, Legitimation, Exchange
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 3: Special Topic: On Poetry , May 1992 , pp. 497 - 510
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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