ABSTRACT
I hope you can see from this book that at the higher levels of the education system the academic study of Shakespeare tends to march to a very different tune. Instead of the idea of Shakespeare as the creative genius who stands outside time, Shakespeare is seen as a writer whose plays are the product of the time in which they were written; the meaning of the plays is similarly seen to depend on the circumstances – the time and place – in which they are seen or their texts read. It so happens that current academic study of Shakespeare is concerned with an agenda that is seeking to promote neither a sense of national unity nor some timeless values whose purity is untouched by the fashionable opinions of today or tomorrow. Contemporary Shakespeare criticism looks instead at issues of power and social injustice; it is interested in gender, race and sexuality as concepts that are not only alive in the plays but important in the lives of those who read, teach, study or act Shakespeare. Shakespeare criticism has become social and political. It might be claimed that the presence of Shakespeare at secondary level is social and political, too, but that is another argument.
