A Cultural Materialist Reading Of Shakespeare

Cultrual materialism emerged as a theoretical movement in the early 1980s and shared much similarity with New Historicism, an American approach to early modern literature. This paper is to apply cultural materialism to the study on Shakespeare.The paper is divided into six parts. "Introduction" briefly talks about definition and characteristics of cultural materialism and reasons for cultural materialists to focus their analysis on literary giants during the Renaissance, especially Shakespeare.Chapter One mainly presents Shakespeare's concern for politics and his consciousness to promote the dominant ideology in Elizabethan and Jacobean era. His heroines seem renovated to have qualities that previous women in literature seldom enjoyed, while he confines those virtuous women to the tolerant scope of patriarchy. In other words, those virtues do no good to those heroines in his plays and don't change their positions in any better way, but are a means for him to illustrate the rationality and necessity of patriarchy; he makes a sharp turn in his creating style in Henry VIII from his second tetralogy histories, in correspondence to the different tastes and values of the Queen and the King; He hastens himself to create the comedy Measure for Measure upon the King's ascendancy to the throne to echo his monarchy theories. The research attempts to show that creators of literary works can't and transcend their contemporary contexts.Chapter Two shifts attention to the receptive end of literary works. The first part recalls the famous Essex Rebellion on the previous evening of which the Chamberlain's men performed the play Richard II in Elizabethan Age and the Queen's identification of herself as Richard II. This historical event in a way exemplifies that the authority's concern about political effects of literary works were real and not uncommon, that is, political imperatives were also aesthetical imperatives in Renaissance. Authorities relate literature to its contexts, so do common audiences, as is reflected in the second part. The portrayals of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice have been changing over the time, which illustrates the instability of literary works' reception corresponding to the receptive context. Shylock's fate is subjected to the interpretation of Venetian law, and Shakespeare's is subordinate to receptive contexts and interpreters' ideologies.Chapter Three illustrates how far Shakespeare's works can be interpreted away from its original meaning and how arts can be converted to propaganda. The distorting power of interpretation under certain context is astonishing.Chapter Four describes Shakespeare voyage in China which follows the course of the Chinese history. The revolutionary, aesthetical and commercial interpretations of Shakespeare reflected the prevalent ideology in different periods. Adapting Shakespeare into Chinese operas and films enriches both local and western arts, though presently the integrating process is still under research and debate.Conclusion generalizes the fundamental features and advocacies of cultural materialism and further maps out the route this thesis takes to apply cultural materialism theory to the study of Shakespeare, from the creator, interpreter to the receiving end. And finally the paper analyzes the theoretical defects of cultural materialism theory and attempts to advise a way out.