ABSTRACT
One way to locate this book is to say that it publishes work first prepared for a seminar on Shakespeare and ideology which took place at the International Shakespeare Congress held in West Berlin in April, 1986. In Berlin, the wall materially marks the city as the site of political contest and ideological division. But texts, too, as we argue below, are sites of ideological and political contestation, and so, in some instances, are conference sessions. In Berlin, participants in the two seminars on Shakespeare and ideology debated, with some heat, not just the political and ideological functions of Elizabethan theater in its own time, but also the functions of Shakespeare within present pedagogical, critical, and theatrical practices. Differences became very obvious: differences, for example, over whether the “playfulness” of Elizabethan theater can function as a critique of oppressive orthodoxies within the conditions for production and reception obtaining in modern middle-class theaters; differences over whether or not Shakespeare's centrality to a universalizing and overtly apolitical pedagogy implies that the study of his work had best be abandoned by those attempting a pedagogy established on other principles; differences over the possibility of merging Marxism with tenets and practices of poststructuralism.
