ABSTRACT
In her book dedicated to ‘reading Shakespeare historically’ Lisa Jardine signals a growing unease within Renaissance studies about the efficacy of current critical paradigms. In the light of this uncertainty, historicisms old and new may well do battle once more, thus ameliorating the stullifying complacency that, lamentably, is now a common feature of encounters between Shakespeare and ‘theory’. The appealing feature of the books under review here is the way that materialism is cast as a particularly protean concept in the hands of their respective authors. Called upon to perform many feats of historical daring, which suffer only the occasional distraction by way of expeditious reference to Marxism, words like ‘dialectic’ appear to have lost their hitherto risible taint of idealism. A prevailing aim of all three books, accomplished with varying degrees of success, is to forge a politics of difference that returns the Shakespearean text to the volatile, unpredictable and discursively complex site of its historical emergence.
