ABSTRACT
Insofar as feminist literary theory and criticism are discursive practices that are rooted in and are informed by late twentieth and early twentyfirst century political, economic, and social practices, they are inevitably presentist in nature. Put another way – more succinctly, perhaps, and appropriating Stephen Greenblatt’s useful formulation – feminism is always already presentist (Greenblatt 1989). It is true that to respond to a Shakespeare text is to enter into a dialogue with the past, whether or not we are prompted, as Greenblatt is, by a desire ‘to speak with the dead’ (Greenblatt 1988a: 1). Such a conversation means entering into a dialogue not only with Shakespeare and his contemporaries, of course, but also with the tradition of theatrical and critical responses to Shakespeare’s texts that has accumulated over the course of
four centuries. And these theatrical and critical responses themselves constitute not merely passive responses but also active constructions of meaning in their own right. Yet we are also compelled ‘to talk with the living’, as Terence Hawkes points out (Hawkes 2002a: 4). Enmeshed in the early twenty-first century as we are, we cannot help but be influenced in our apprehension of Shakespeare’s texts by contemporary ideologies and events that constitute us, even as we, in turn, constitute Shakespeare’s texts – that construct meanings in us, even as we, in turn, construct meanings in texts.
