ABSTRACT
The Black Nineties, we saw, unfolded for the masses as one of the harshest decades in English history. In that extraordinary world, of a harrowing underclass misery so desperate it could view Spanish armadas as emancipatory, of a turbulent religio-political inheritance vitalising multiple lineages of oppositional thought, and of a social order fi ssiparous at both elite and parochial levels, we found in Shakespeare an habitué of critical perspectives on power, steadily publicising its discrediting abusiveness, and emerging at many points as a risk-taking radical. Himself the product of an economically destabilised family and township, and writing for the arena theatres in the transgressive Liberties, Shakespeare was persistent, we saw, in the exposure of a society comprehensively obtuse and repressive in its hierarchic ideologies of class and gender.
