ABSTRACT
From the Janus-faced position of an afterword writer I want to reflect on a set of questions implied by the main title of this volume and explored, in fruitful but necessarily provisional ways, by many of the contributors. The questions are difficult and I don't have satisfactory answers to them. Indeed one of the results of working on this volume, of participating in the process by which this set of conference papers and responses to them have been revised for publication, is that I see more clearly now than I did a year ago the contours of what I don't know, or cannot articulate clearly, about my own political options and those available to members of that (possible) coalition of Shakespearean critics and teachers invoked by Walter Cohen in this book. I also see better, however, how the questions raised implicitly and explicitly by my co-contributors about the problem of political agency are related to questions currently being addressed by other left-wing intellectuals who are linked, across disciplinary and national boundaries, by the material and ideological contradictions of their position as oppositional educators whose political views entail a critical perspective on the educational institutions that trained them and within which most of them earn their living.
