Reinterpreting Shakespeare Today

Abstract

The aim of this study is to further the development of fresh readings of Shakespeare’s drama, readings designed to activate the revolutionary imaginative vision that invites discovery in his plays today. It is intended as a contribution to what remains a fundamental objective of radical criticism at the beginning of the twenty-first century: to contest and displace the established interpretations of canonical works, and thereby transform both the present function of past texts and the practice of criticism itself. The closing decades of the twentieth century witnessed the terminal disillusionment of most students and teachers with traditional assumptions about the nature and point of literary criticism. English Literature is still, in both conventional and more modish versions, one of the most widely studied subjects in the school and university curriculum. But it is a subject which has long been recognized, even in conservative quarters, to be in dire disarray and in urgent need of reconstruction.¹ Alternative perspectives opened up by feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalytic theory, new historicism and cultural materialism have thrown the rationale, and hence the interpretive authority, of once impregnable modes of criticism into serious question. It is now hard to resist the conclusion that the main function of orthodox criticism has been to bolster the beliefs upon which our patriarchal, class-divided culture depends.²