Rumor and Shakespearean drama: Tongues errant, tongues' errands.

摘要

This dissertation establishes rumor as an important critical and conceptual category for reading Shakespeare's plays. Rumor permeates Shakespeare's plays. Shakespearean rumor is an unverified, unreliable narrative circulating in a community, and it forms the core of his plays generic and dramaturgical complexity. Shakespeare constructs rumor as a hermeneutic distinct from, though related to, slander, defamation, gossip and other forms of disorderly speech. I argue that Shakespeare's hermeneutic of rumor is best understood as imaginative fact. Imaginative fact incorporates rumor's four distinguishing characteristics---neutrality, embodiment, relationship to history and revelatory function---to form a space that brings together the imaginary and the inventive. Rumor inhabits the space between act and fact, and rumor's unreliability becomes a lens that Shakespeare uses to make his play worlds legible. In this dissertation, I treat 2 Henry IV, Measure for Measure, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale. Ultimately, the importance of rumor within Shakespearean drama makes possible the ways we as critics have constructed criticism about Shakespeare's plays, and this dissertation illuminates rumor's silent yet central discursive prefiguration.