1. Actually, there are two histories of materialist Shakespeare criticism offered in this collection of essays. One is supplied by editor Ivo Kamps, in his introduction, and the other by polymath Fredric Jameson, as a kind of afterword. In between are lodged thirteen historically-minded studies written over the last decade and a half by an impressive coterie of critics, covering all of Shakespeare's dramatic genres. Readers who are already familiar with many of these essays (all of which have been published previously) can retrace and reconsider the many challenging and theoretically varied arguments concerning the materiality of Elizabethan/Jacobean culture, of which Shakespearean drama was both product and producer. They might recall the epiphanic moment when they learned, courtesy of one or more of these critics, that the 'comfortable pieties' of past (idealist) Shakespeare studies were always politically interested--and usually conservatively so. In other words, to paraphrase Ivo Kamps, they will be reminded how, within a few short years, materialist critics have attempted to change permanently the way Shakespeare is read (17).

2. Kamps makes this point in his introduction, in which he discusses the 'meteoric rise' (1) of materialist Shakespeare criticism from the mid-seventies to the present. His useful overview surveys the ground common to various groups of materialists (i. e., traditional and neo-Marxists, cultural materialists, new historicists, and materialist feminists), important differences among these critics, and some of the theoretical and practical problems with which materialists have grappled in the recent past and which will no doubt continue to preoccupy them in the future.

3. Although Kamps writes that 'the category "materialism" is far too broad and multifaceted a practice to be reduced to a uniform, teleological narrative' (13), one of the implications of his introduction is that, collectively, materialist Shakespeare critics are a progressive group. Unlike the 'mechanical materialism,' or 'vulgar' Marxism, of the past, the new work is a 'flexible,' 'sophisticated,' 'nuanced' 'mix' of practices. At one point, Kamps specifically uses the word 'progress' to compliment the advances made by younger materialists 'toward the rehistoricizing of Renaissance ideas about individuality and/or subjectivity' (15). The implication is that progress has been made in other areas, as well. 'Over the last two decades,' Kamps writes, '[o]lder interpretations have been overhauled or displaced' by new materialist readings that illustrate a 'broader awareness of . . . literature as socially and materially constructed' (14). One could go on, but the argument is clear enough from these examples: materialist insights have changed Shakespeare criticism for the better in a number of ways, as the essays by Paul Delany, Walter Cohen, Alan Sinfield, Stephen Greenblatt, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Linda E. Boose, Robert Weimann, and other well-known critics are meant to illustrate.

4. Like Kamps, Fredric Jameson, in the collection's other history ('Radicalizing Radical Shakespeare: The Permanent Revolution in Shakespeare Studies'), promotes the 'progressive' thesis. Neo-materialism has moved beyond old-fashioned Marxist questions about Shakespeare's class allegiance and a belief in unified ideological subjects. In its Foucauldian concern with 'the general problematics of power, something characteristic of a whole span of Ôradical' Shakespeares from the English "cultural-materialist" ones to those of American "new historicism,"' it has also 'scandalized the remnants of a high-cultural Shakespearean tradition' that had hitherto refused to countenance the 'nastier features of the Elizabethan police-state' (327). Jameson suggests, too, however, that the 'fundamental' materialist category of power is itself 'the space of discursive struggle'--a space 'between base and superstructure' (328):

   The tugging of power in some purely cultural direction opens up a space of multiple alliances in which the new social movements can all participate; the drawing back in the other direction . . . incites us to new and more complex explorations of the relationship between capitalist production and power (both exploitation and domination) as such: in other words it also leads on to the mysteries of commodification--mysteries which can be expected to be significantly intensified within the originality of our own postmodern or world-system's moment of present history. (328)

   Jameson is diplomatically re-stating the well-known fact that traditional Marxists and what Kamps calls their 'poststructuralist offshoots' (i.e., materialists of various stripes who have eschewed traditional Marxism's 'fierce emphasis on economic determination' [4]) have some very different (theoretical, methodological, and political) agendas. He also suggests, though, that (left-leaning) critical pluralism has been, and will continue to be, a good thing. Of course, anyone familiar with the, at times, heated debates among various explicitly political critics during the last decade or so might well question whether a mutual interest in the subject of 'power' ever in fact produced the kind of 'alliances' of which Jameson speaks. For example, feminist Linda Boose has attacked Stephen Greenblatt and other new historicists for perpetuating old historical (patriarchal) prejudices by failing to consider gender issues in their writing; Greenblatt has criticized Jameson for the reductionism of the latter's allegedly less-than-flexible Marxism; and Marxist Walter Cohen has zeroed in on the new historicism's unwillingness or inability to explain historical change. (See Boose 1987, 735, Greenblatt 1990, 148-51 and Cohen 1987, 24) Perhaps, then, if one must insist on the progressive quality of the materialist 'enterprise,' that progress should be described as a forward movement with elements of regress. 1 But which elements are 'regressive' depends, of course, on who is writing the history.

5. This last point raises the question of what other kinds of histories might be written about the criticism collected in this volume. (And, of course, there are also potentially many other--and very different--collections of materialist criticism that could be produced and historicized.) As much as I share Jameson's penchant for base-superstructure metaphorics and a non-teleological but still totalizing form of historical analysis, I can imagine that a Greenblatt, or a Boose, or a Montrose, or even a Weimann might feel a bit uncomfortable with the notion that their work is fully explicable in terms of Jameson's 'horizons' of Marxist meaning (class struggle, mode of production). This is to say, then, that while, in this particular anthology, Kamps and Jameson have, respectively, the first and last words on the history of recent materialist Shakespeare criticism, that history lends itself to a number of rewritings, some of which, I am sure, are already in progress.

Note

1. This description is borrowed from Alex Callinicos, who has argued that classical Marxism's dialectical conception of history is that of 'a spiral movement, in which each advance contains within itself an element of regress.' (1995, 152)

   

List of works cited

Boose, Linda E. 1987. 'The Family in Shakespeare Studies; or--Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or--The Politics of

Politics.' Renaissance Quarterly 40.

Callinicos, Alex. 1995. Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University

Press.

Cohen, Walter. 1987 'Political Criticism of Shakespeare,' Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology,

edited by Jean E. Howard and Marion O'Connor. New York: Methuen.

Greenblatt, Stephen. 1990. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York and London: Routledge.