ABSTRACT
The new wave of radical Shakespeare criticism in Britain has emerged during the long spell of Tory power which began in 1979. Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore edited Political Shakespeare, identified as among the foremost of these studies, in 1985, a year after Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (1984). Then followed Alternative Shakespeares, edited by John Drakakis (1985), Terence Hawkes’s That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (1986), and Terry Eagleton’s William Shakespeare (1986), to name a few of the most influential books. The flow of radical readings continues with The Shakespeare Myth, edited by Graham Holderness (1988). The coincidence of radical discussion with Tory rule may be a coincidence, of course. But arguably, the institution of academic criticism has done what seems to be politically satisfying, if profoundly surprising, given the usual quietism of British academic critical discourse. It has made a radical attack on conservative positions at a time when the right has commandeered debate almost unchallenged (as in the discussion of education) in many areas. At the same time, it seems that in spite of the government’s orgy of compulsive cuts in subsidy for theatre, radical productions of Shakespeare, or productions advertised as radical, do occur in both publicly subsidized theatre such as the National Theatre and in companies where a considerable proportion of funds comes from private finance. The new English Shakespeare Company, for instance, was funded by the Allied Irish Bank over 1986-7, and continues to be so, in addition to its Arts Council subsidy. (If banks were not such international bodies, there might be an irony here recognized by Terry Eagleton in the first issue of Textual Practice in which the colonial repressed returns from the margins to support British culture.)
Is this one of the rare occasions in which radical academic critique and the performing arts are dancing ideologically cheek to cheek? One surely needs to be sceptical here. Alan Sinfield has pointed out in Political Shakespeare that the convergence, when it happens at all, has generally been in mutually conservative practices over the last thirty years. And so it is instructive to ask whether the correlation between Shakespeare in criticism and in the theatre is as neat and satisfying as it may seem. This entails a further set of questions. In what sense is the demythologizing and politicizing of Shakespeare going on in English studies relevant beyond them? It is generally assumed that it is, but is it? Second, particularly in view of the predominantly middle-class composition of theatre audiences, in what way is it possible to direct Shakespeare in a radical form in the theatre today? If there is a reciprocity between theory and practice one would expect this to be revealed in recent productions of Shakespeare. Some productions in the summer of 1987 purported to be radical readings of Shakespeare: the National Theatre’s King Lear and the new English Shakespeare Company’s Henry IV and Henry V, which are to continue in repertory until the spring of 1989. Were they? How easy is it, anyway, to produce radical
Shakespeare, privately or publicly subsidized, when theatre is subject to ever-increasing economic constraints? The Chancellor of the Exchequer announced a 3.2 per cent cut for the arts and libraries in his autumn budget for 1987. Though Richard Luce subsequently announced an increase in grant to the Arts Council, new legislation under the Insolvency Act of 1986 will mean that companies in deficit will no longer be allowed the customary twelve-month breathing space to prevent closure. Since the report of the Cork Committee, Arts Council practice is changing: an annual payment-by-results policy is being introduced into subsidy. So it’s becoming harder to take risks with controversial productions.
