ABSTRACT
For most of the twentieth century, Shakespeare was our contemporary. Jan Kott found a cynical sensibility in him that spoke to a civilization living in the shadow of the Bomb and the Holocaust, J. L. Styan discovered a convergence between Shakespearean productions mounted by the Elizabethan original performance practices movement and Brecht’s experiments with alienation eff ects, and Brecht himself, when asked which authors of the classical tradition were best suited to his style of “epic theatre,” nominated Shakespeare.1 But today, after a generation of Shakespeare studies dominated by the new historicism and its off spring the new materialism, the belief that we can share Shakespeare’s world view has become not only epistemologically dubious but ethically suspect. The assertion of an epistemic gap between the early modern period and the present that was a hallmark of the new historicism has been promoted to a moral imperative in David Kastan’s articulation of the principles of the new materialism. When Kastan contends that we must recognize that “What value Shakespeare has for us” lies in “his diff erence from us,” he argues for the “moral relevance” of this concession in order to “ward off our narcissism” and prevent the “premature imposition of present day interests and values” on the alterity of the early modern world.2
