ABSTRACT
The objections are familiar enough: the ‘Elizabethan World Picture’ simplifies the Elizabethans and, still more, Shakespeare. Yet if we look again at what Tillyard was opposing, his historicism seems less objectionable-assertions, for example, that Shakespeare does not ‘seem to call for explanations beyond those which a whole heart and a free mind abundantly supply’; that ‘he betrays no bias in affairs of church or state’; that ‘No period of Enghsh literature has less to do with politics than that during which English letters reached their zenith’ (Campbell 1964, pp. 3-4). All these quotations are taken by Lily B. Campbell from critics influential between the wars. She and Tillyard demonstrate unquestionably that there was an ideological position, something like ‘the Elizabethan World picture’, and that it is a significant presence in Shakespeare’s plays. Unfortunately inadequacies in their theorizing of ideology have set the agenda for most subsequent work. We shall argue initially that even that criticism which has sought to oppose the idea that Shakespeare believed in and
expresses a political hierarchy whose rightness is guaranteed by its reflection of a divine hierarchy, is trapped nevertheless in a problematic of order, one which stems from a long tradition of idealist philosophy.
