Margreta de Grazia, The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece

Margreta de Grazia, The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, Ed. Margreta de Grazia, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Born in the same year (1818), Jacob Burckhardt and Karl Marx together (though quite independently) gave birth to the Renaissance. Not to the Renaissance as the rebirth of antiquity but to the Renaissance as the birth of the Modern—the Renaissance, that is, as Early Modern—the period that anticipated the future rather than recovered the past. In Burckhardt’s 1860 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, that birth took the form of individualism; in Marx’s 1867 Capital, it took the form of capitalism. (17)

The play has accordingly been read as dramatizing any number of relations to that momentous transition form one social formation to another (feudal to capitalist) and from one type of individual to another (loyal to self-interested). We thus have readings that, empowered by Lawrence Stone’s Crisis of the Aristocracy, see Lear tottering on the brink between old and new, Hooker and Hobbes, drives and impulses. Other readings see Lear clearing the way for this break by dramatizing the exhaustion of older structures and beliefs (absolutism, supernaturalism, spiriutalism) that cave in from the very weight of their own contradictions in unwitting preparation for their supersession. (20)

Each reading sees the play as more or less intrepidly gesturing toward (or away form) the future, as if it were doing its part to start (or forestall) the rolling historical ball on its teleological course into the Modern. /
So what we have is a range of readings positioning King Lear in relation to the Early Modern; pre-, proto- retro-, avant-garde, and ultra/trans-early Modern King Lear respectively. (20)

There is a way in which seeing the Renaissance as the Early-Now commit itself to the very universalizing tendency that historicizing set out to avoid in the first place. … It is what Foucault following Nietzsche would avoid by replacing a teleologically driven continuum with proliferative genealogies or archaeologies. The reading that follows below makes no pretense of avoiding periodization, however, for it too exists in relation to it. Set resolutely against the Modern, it could easily be added to the list compiled above, with a new prefix: anti-Early Modern. The essay is about how King Lear blocks the mobility identified since the nineteenth century with the Modern—through its locking of persons into things, proper selves into property, subjectivity effects into personal effects—in an attempt to withstand flux or fluidity, superflux or superfluity. (21)