Hawkes - Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2

How can we recognize or deal with the new? Any equipment we bring to the task will have been designed to engage with the old: it will look for and identify extensions and developments of what we already know. To some degree the unprecedented will always be unthinkable.

The New Accents series has made its own wary negotiation around that paradox, turning it, over the years, into the central concern of a continuing project. We are obliged, of course, to be bold. Change is our proclaimed business, innovation our announced quarry, the accents of the future the language in which we deal. So we have sought, and still seek, to confront and respond to those developments in literary studies that seem crucial aspects of the tidal waves of transformation that continue to sweep across our culture. Areas such as structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, Marxism, semiotics, subculture, deconstruction, dialogism, postmodernism, and the new attention to the nature and modes of language, politics and way of life that these bring, have already been the primary concern of a large number of our volumes. Their nuts and bolts exposition of the issues at stake in new ways of writing texts and new ways of reading them has proved an effective statagem against perplexity.

But the questions of what texts are or may be has also become more and more complex. It is not just the impact of electronic modes of communication, such as computer networks and data banks, that has forced us to revise our sense of the sort of material to which the process called reading may apply. Satellite television and supersonic travel have eroded the traditional capacities of time and space to confirm prejudice, reinforce ignorance, and conceal significant difference. Ways of life and cultural practices of which we had barely heard can now be set compellingly besidecan even confrontour own. The effect is to make us ponder the culture we have inherited; to see it, perhaps for the first time, as an intricate, continuing construction. And that means that we can also begin to see, and to question, those arrangements of foregrounding and back-grounding, of stressing and repressing, of placing at the centre and of restricting to the periphery, that give our own way of life its distinctive character.

Small wonder if, nowadays, we frequently find ourselves at the boundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkable: peering into an abyss out of which there begin to lurch awkwardlyformed monsters with unaccountableyet unavoidabledemands on our attention. These may involve unnerving styles of narrative, unsettling notions of history, unphilosophical ideas about

philosophy, even unchildish views of comics, to say nothing a host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuring names.

In this situation, straightforward elucidation, careful unpicking, informative bibliographies, can offer positive help, and each New Accents volume will continue to include these. But if the project of closely scrutinizing the new remains nonetheless a disconcerting one, there are still overwhelming reasons for giving it all the consideration we can muster. The unthinkable, after all, is that which covertly shapes our thoughts.

TERENCE HAWKES

Collections such as this depend wholly on the energy, goodwill and cooperation of individual contributors. Everyone involved in the present volume gave unstintingly of those resources in addition to the scholarship and critical acumen for which they had been recruited. They deserve my warmest thanks. The enthusiastic help of John Drakakis in the planning and development of the project was crucial as well as characteristic. For the period of study leave which enabled me fully to engage with it, I am extremely grateful to my colleagues at the University of Wales, Cardiff. My greatest debt of gratitude remains, as always, to my wife.