Satirizing The Audience: Shakespeare And The Uses Of Obscurity, 1594-1601

Abstract

This dissertation examines Shakespeare’s techniques of formal obscurity in four plays: Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, Hamlet, and Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Juberg shows, attached specific satirical and aesthetic functions to deliberately obscure writing. As satire migrated from page to stage in the last decade of the 16th century, Shakespeare recombined the generic codes and conventionally confusing language of print satire to create his own type of satirical theater, with which he challenged prevailing norms of literary and theatrical interpretation and tested the limits of audience understanding.