A reading of Shakespeare's problem plays into history: A new historicist interpretation of social crisis and sexual politics in 'Troilus and Cressida' and 'Measure for Measure

This study is aimed to read Shakespeare's problem comedies, Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure into the historical and cultural context of dynamically-changing English Renaissance society at the turn of the sixteenth century. In the historical context of emerging capitalism, growing economic crisis, reformed theology, changing social hierarchy, and increasing sexual control, this study investigates the nature of complicated moral problems that the plays consistently present. The primary argument is that the serious and dark picture of human dilemma is attributed not to Shakespeare's private imagination, but to social, political, economic, and religious crises in early modern England.;The introduction argues that literature as a form of cultural memory registers social traces and ideological struggles. In that respect, this study attempts to integrate the textual and the social in a network of material practices. Another objective of this study is to resituate cultural traces and social energies encoded in the problem comedies in the postmodern theoretical context to understand the plays in a dialogic interaction between the original historical context of textual production and the modern reader.;In the reading of Troilus and Cressida, this study discusses linguistic confusion, value judgment, and commodification of female body in connection with the transition from feudal absolutism to capitalist relativism in early modern England. With emerging capitalist relativism, language loses its ontological referentiality, value is deprived of its intrinsic property, and the female body is subject to the market principle of exchange. In the analysis of Measure for Measure, this study examines human subjectivity and judicial sexual control from a perspective of Puritan asceticism and social reform. Sexual control is studied in connection with the spiritualization of the household and increasing illegitimacy rates in England at the turn of the sixteenth century.