William Shakespeare (Rereading Literature)

About this book

This is a bold and original reinterpretation of almost all of Shakespeares major plays in the light of the Marxist feminist and semiotic ideas of our own time. Through a set of tenaciously detailed readings the book illuminates a number of persistent problems or conflicts in Shakespearean drama - in particular a contradiction between words and things body and language which is also explored in terms of law sexuality and Nature. Language and desire Terry Eagleton argues are seen by Shakespeare as a kind of surplus over and above the body stable and social roles and a fixed human nature. But the attitude of the plays to such a surplus is profoundly ambivalent; if they admire it as the very source of human creativity they also fear its anarchic trangressive force. Underlying such ambiguities the book convincingly shows is a deeper ideological struggle between feudalist traditionalism on the one hand and the emergence of new forms of bourgeois individualism on the other. This book revels how in the light of our own contemporary theories of language sexuality and society we can understand the issues present in Shakespeares drama which previously have remained obscure.