ABSTRACT
In recent years William Shakespeare has been a special object of attention for 'new historicist' and 'cultural materialist' critics: numbering, amongst others, Stephen Greenblatt and Jean E. Howard in the United States; and John Drakakis, Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, Graham Holderness and Terence Hawkes in the United Kingdom. Traditional psychoanalytic criticism has been chiefly indebted to Ecole Freudienne and has tended to use literature to interpret the psychology of an author or character. Literary writing which proclaims its integrity, and literary theory which demands that integrity of writing, merely repeat that moment of repression when language and sexuality were first ordered into place, putting down the unconscious processes which threaten the resolution of the Oedipal drama and of narrative form alike. In Meaning by Shakespeare, Terence Hawkes presents the case for cultural materialism by way of Hamlet and Hamlet's use of the play 'The Murder of Gonzago'.
