ABSTRACT
What is ‘presentism’? It’s easier to begin with what it’s not. At the moment, a number of siren songs drift invitingly across the
field of Shakespeare Studies. The commanding cadences of New Historicism, now institutionalised in teaching, in new editions of Shakespeare’s plays and in a plethora of study guides, still ring strongly out. But alternative strains are also discernible. In the last few years the opening chords of a new formalism, a new aestheticism, a new economic criticism, and most prominently, what has been called a ‘new new historicism’ or a ‘new materialism’ have been sounded.1
