In an attempt to forge some kind of workable historical method of criticism in light of challenges from structuralism, semiotics, phenomenology, deconstruction, reader-response theory, New Historicism, and various psychological approaches to literature, Robert D. Hume some time ago set out as his first principle that ‘Historicism at bottom implies the illumination of text by context’, arguing that

Thus extracted, the proposition seems almost commonplace, for much of the critical work since Hume wrote has excavated, dissected, and analysed contextual materials in Shakespeare’s time to understand more reliably the cultural moment in which he wrote: the culture that formed his thinking and the culture of those who constituted his audiences. Such examinations, furthermore, have complicated the issue of combination (and occasionally also of simultaneity) by understanding the further issue of representation: that the ‘objectivity’ of past events and the records of past cultural beliefs when scrutinized provide no securely objective record at all, but rather the subjectivity of past documents and the necessary partiality of their observations, statements, and arguments.