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Burt, Richard (1998) Unspeakable Shaxxxspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture, New York: St. Martin’s. Looks at appropriations of Shakespeare in popular culture from Hollywood productions to pornographic adaptations and considers changing ideas of high and low culture.


Dobson, Michael (1992) The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Investigates the rise of Shakespeare as the national English poet from the Restoration to David Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee and considers the endurance of this initial construction in later ages.

Drakakis, John (1985) (ed.) Alternative Shakespeares, London: Methuen. New historical and cultural materialist essays that break with traditional Shakespearean criticism by demystifying Shakespeare.


Elsom, John (1989) (ed.) Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?, London: Routledge. Participants discuss whether Shakespeare is contemporary or ‘‘universal,” considering such issues as translation, sexism, and nationalism in the plays.

Erickson, Peter (1991) Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves, Berkeley: University of California Press. Juxtaposes analyses of the representation of women in Shakespeare’s plays with women writers’ representations of Shakespeare.


Grady, Hugh (1991) The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Adamantly recognizes the “historicity” of criticism and insists that there is no “authentic” Shakespeare; surveys Shakespearean criticism from the late nineteenth century to the present, focusing on individual schools.

—— (1996) Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Considers the notion of selfhood in Shakespeare as informed by contemporary post-structural theory.


Hawkes, Terence (1986) That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process, London: Methuen. Drawing on Bakhtin and other notions of intertextual relations, demonstrates that we have no access to true, authoritative meanings for Shakespeare’s plays.

—— (1992) Meaning by Shakespeare, London: Routledge. Continues the study of how Shakespeare’s “meaning” is conditioned by reception and cultural context. Argues that Shakespeare’s plays do not mean, but that we mean “by” Shakespeare.

—— (1996) (ed.) Alternative Shakespeares, Volume 2, London: Routledge. A retrospective of new historicist and materialist approaches that denies the idea of a single true Shakespeare and questions the received or inherited picture we have of Shakespeare as timeless and universal, covering issues such as gender, sexuality, and race.

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