ABSTRACT
In recent decades 'theoretically inflected thinking' has focused on the politics of Shakespearean comedy. In doing so it has probably told us more about postmodernism than it has about the issues that are explicitly addressed in the plays. Shakespeare's first romantic comedy is a playful story about the follies of misguided idealism. The author of a standard work on Shakespeare's poetics stated that Renaissance theorists 'had little sense of a simultaneity of imagination and delivery'. Terence Hawkes explained that the idea of a literary text expressing its author's mind 'would have been unfamiliar to Shakespeare, involved as he was in the collaborative enterprise of dramatic production'. Renaissance poets knew that they were writing for posterity and that their words would be read in centuries to come. Desiderius Erasmus also attacked his contemporaries, protesting that scholastics derived their moral norms from abstract principles rather than human realities.
