ABSTRACT
Alternative to what? Not Falstaff ‘s ‘damnable iteration’ (I Henry IV I. ii. 88), but a question which takes us back, as Derrida would have it, to those roots in what has become ‘the unity of a context’ which itself opens onto a recontextualization (Derrida 1992:63). If, some ten years after the appearance of the first Alternative Shakespeares, the question ‘Alternative to what?’ carries the force of something other than a rhetorical flourish, then it is, in part, a measure of the distance which Shakespeare studies has travelled during that time. Alternatives to alternatives may sound tautological to dedicated anti-intellectual followers of critical fashion striving to keep abreast, let alone get on top of the task of refurbishing a tired critical terminology. But those theoretical modes of critical practice which began to surface in the late 1970s, and which have now become what is referred to disparagingly by some as ‘the new orthodoxy’, have themselves undergone considerable transformation during the intervening period as a direct consequence of persistent and detailed forms of self-criticism.
