ABSTRACT
There are several political Shakespeares, two of whom are certainly wellknown to literary scholars. The most familiar of these is the canonized Shakespeare, a product of the tradition of reading, whose name is identified with culture itself but whose plays are often used to maintain a difference between literature and popular culture. The modern literary institution generally uses this Shakespeare to organize culture according to the thematics of a post-Enlightenment humanism which finds universal psychological truths in his characters and loves him best for writing poetry that transcends history. This ahistorical Shakespeare is, in other words, quite clearly a construct who speaks the politics of culture in the tradition of Arnold and Eliot. Another political Shakespeare familiar to the Anglo-American literary establishment is the Renaissance playwright. He is also a construct, albeit one who has been assembled to supplement and - on rare occasions - even to challenge the ahistorical Shakespeare. Where the literary figure is presumed to have written truths that obtain over time and across cultures; the man Shakespeare is situated in a Renaissance context. His writing is largely topical and allegorical as he comments on the figures and policies of his time in relation to which, then, one can fix his political identity. This historical personage is produced by scholars who set their work in opposition to the idealizing themes of literature. They use Shakespeare as the means of constructing culturespecific conditions for reading. In this other scene of reading, which grounds literature in history, Shakespeare becomes a means of turning the canonized Shakespeare into a window onto Renaissance social relations, a mirror of his times, a text that presupposes a context" outside" of itself. While opposed, these Shakespeares are in large part the product of the same modern literary institution and speak its politics. Indeed, one reason
Shakespeare remains so central to our work is because he had been used to constitute a field of argumentation which appears to be composed of contradictory and competing positions. By so doing, we have also performed an act of containment. Rarely do we feel compelled to entertain the possibility of any other Shakespeares, so intrinSically coherent is the logic of this outside/inside, popular/literary, historical/universal Shakespeare.
