San Antonio College Library

This collection of linked essays centres on the power of "will and testament" in Shakespeare's writing. Adopting a broadly new historicist perspective, the book touches on theoretical questions of authorship, intentionality and the "disappearance" of the historical Shakespeare in modernist criticism. The focus of the book is the relation of "high" theory to "low" archives.

"Shakespeare is, and always was, political. This is the contention of the most challenging of the new critical approaches currently disrupting literary criticism: cultural materialism. It disallows the idea of Shakespeare as a universal genius whose work is great precisely to the extent that it transcends politics and history. Combining historical enquiry, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis it produces not just new readings...

The four plays of Shakespeare's Henriad and the slightly later Hamlet brilliantly explore interconnections between political power and interior subjectivity as productions of the newly emerging constellation we call modernity. Hugh Grady argues that for Shakespeare subjectivity was a critical, negative mode of resistance to power--not, as many recent critics have asserted, its abettor. (Amazon).