ABSTRACT
In a letter to the London Review of Books, in response to the views of critics of Shakespeare associated with ‘cultural materialism’, Boris Ford wrote that he could not help speculating
when they last read one of Shakespeare’s major plays as they might perhaps listen to one of Bach’s unaccompanied cello sonatas or Mozart’s string quintets: because they find them profoundly moving, or spiritually restoring, or simply strangely enjoyable. Or do they sit listening entranced to Bach’s and Mozart’s ‘texts’ as ‘critical representations of ideological materials which disclose the conditions of their own historical existence’?
