Howard Jean Elizabeth - Marxist Shakespeares

ACCENTS ON SHAKESPEARE

General editor: TERENCE HAWKES

Marxist Shakespeares

Marxist Shakespeares uses the rich analytic resources of the Marxist tradition to redefine what the study of Shakespeare can mean. The essays collected here reveal that Marxism remains an inescapable challenge to prevailing modes of literary scholarship, essential to addressing such issues as:

This book offers new insights into the historical conditions within which Shakespeares representations of class and gender emerged, and into Shakespeares role in the world-wide culture industry stretching from Hollywood to the Globe Theatre.

Marxist Shakespeares will be a vital resource for students of Shakespeare as it examines Marxs own readings of Shakespeare, Derridas engagement with Marx, and the importance of Pierre Bourdieu, Georges Bataille, and Alice Clark within a continuing tradition of Marxist thought.

Jean E. Howard teaches Early Modern literature at Columbia University. She is the author of The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994) and co-author, with Phyllis Rackin, of Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeares English Histories (1997).

Scott Cutler Shershow teaches English literature and literary theory at Miami University, Ohio. He is the author of Puppets and Popular Culture (1996), and of articles on Renaissance drama, popular culture and cultural studies.

ACCENTS ON SHAKESPEARE
General Editor: TERENCE HAWKES

It is more than twenty years since the New Accents series helped to establish theory as a fundamental and continuing feature of the study of literature at undergraduate level. Since then, the need for short, powerful cutting edge accounts of and comments on new developments has increased sharply. In the case of Shakespeare, books with this sort of focus have not been readily available. Accents on Shakespeare aims to supply them.

Accents on Shakespeare volumes will either apply theory, or broaden and adapt it in order to connect with concrete teaching concerns. In the process, they will also reflect and engage with the major developments in Shakespeare studies of the last ten years.

The series will lead as well as follow. In pursuit of this goal it will be a two-tiered series. In addition to affordable, adoptable titles aimed at modular undergraduate courses, it will include a number of research-based books. Spirited and committed, these second-tier volumes advocate radical change rather than stolidly reinforcing the status quo.

IN THE SAME SERIES

Shakespeare and Appropriation

Edited by Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer

Shakespeare Without Women

Dympna Callaghan

Philosophical Shakespeares

Edited by John J. Joughin

Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium

Edited by Hugh Grady

Marxist Shakespeares

Edited by Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow

Marxist
Shakespeares

Edited by

JEAN E. HOWARD and
SCOTT CUTLER SHERSHOW

First published 2001 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.

2001 Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow; individual chapters, the respective contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Marxist Shakespeares / Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow.

p. cm (Accents on Shakespeare)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Shakespeare, William, 15641616 Political and social views. 2. Literature and societyEnglandHistory16th century. 3. Women and literature EnglandHistory16th century.

4. Marxist criticism. I. Howard, Jean E. (Jean Elizabeth), 1948 II. Shershow, Scott Cutler, 1953 III. Series.

PR3024.M39 2000
822.33dc21

00030823

ISBN 0415202345 (pbk)
ISBN 0415202337 (hbk)
ISBN 0-203-13118-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-18754-7 (Glassbook Format)

Contents

Contributors

Denise Albanese is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She is the author of New Science, New World (Duke University Press, 1996), and she works on critical science and technology studies as well as on early modern culture and Shakespeare performance. She is currently at work on a study of Kenneth Branagh, popular Shakespeare, and the place of American Anglophilia in global culture.

Crystal Bartolovich is an Assistant Professor of English and Textual Studies at Syracuse University. She has published essays on a range of topics in Marxism and early modern cultural studies; currently, she is completing a book manuscript, Boundary Disputes: Notes on the Socialization of Culture.

Barbara E. Bowen is Associate Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has published a book on Troilus and Cressida and articles on African American literature and the politics of academic labor. She has been active for twenty years in the labor movement and is a union leader at CUNY. Her current research project is a book on Aemelia Lanyer.

Dympna Callaghan is William P. Tolley Professor in the Humanities at Syracuse University. She is author of Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy (Harvester, 1989) and Shakespeare Without Women (Routledge, 1999); co-author of The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (Blackwell, 1994), and co-editor of Feminist Readings in Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (Cambridge University Press, 1996). In addition, she has edited two collections, A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (Blackwell, 2000) and The Duchess of Malfi Casebook (Macmillan, 2000).

Walter Cohen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where he is also Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School. He has published Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Cornell University Press, 1985) and co-edited The Norton Shakespeare (Norton, 1997).

Richard Halpern is Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. He is author of The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Cornell University Press, 1991) and Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Cornell University Press, 1997).

Jean E. Howard teaches English at Columbia University. Her recent books include