Sex, Lies and Videotape: Representing the Past inShakespeare in Love, Mapping a Future for Presentism*

Abstract

This essay uses the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love as a staging ground to make the case for a critical presentism in early modern studies. Presentism, the essay argues, can be theoretically positioned to draw together a range of currently divisive textual practices; among them, an increasingly antiquarian historicism that seeks to situate the aesthetic artefact in its cultural past, but fails to acknowledge the ways in which the artwork continues to live in the present; a materialism that reduces the artwork, and especially film, to mere fetishized commodity product; and various modes of textual practice situated within or against a body of de-radicalized post-structuralist theory. To do so, however, such a presentism will need to reinvest in the aesthetic as a site of collective Utopian desire.

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