ABSTRACT
It is apparent by now that cultural materialism has achieved both diversity and growth. But there can be little doubt that Jonathan Dollimore’s pioneer study Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and Its Contemporaries is the most important and representative product of this critical movement.1 Since its first edition, there has appeared a large body of work in the cultural materialist vein, yet Radical Tragedy remains the most engaging and substantial as well as the most influential example of its kind. As the 68-page Introduction to the second edition indicates, its author is fully conscious of his own and his book’s cultural importance. Beginning with the question, ‘Why did I write this book?’, he embeds the genesis and significance of Radical Tragedy in a spiritual and intellectual autobiography stretching from his experience as an unhappy school leaver in a car factory to that of an internationally successful academic brooding in Moscow on the theme of high culture and state power: ‘So why that night did I have a dream in which two soldiers had become Shakespeare?’ (xi, lii). This autobiography in turn is centrally located in a larger history which encompasses the history of tragic theory and, more importantly, the development of Renaissance studies, literary theory, and cultural analysis during the 1970s and 1980s. But even without the benefit of this Introduction, no one could nowadays fail to perceive that Radical Tragedy is a key work in the history of radical Shakespearean criticism.
