For two decades now Shakespeare scholars have been busy exposing the use of this writer in the legitimation of various oppressive regimes - sexual, imperialist, racial, class, and so on. To put it crudely: as World's Most Canonical Author, Shakespeare has become synonymous with the Establishment. Not a few Shakespeare critics would now agree with William Hazlitt that Shakespeare 'had a leaning to the arbitrary [i.e. anti-democratic] side of the question' - or, perhaps, would ruefully second Walt Whitman's accusation that, his 'dramas' being 'the superbest poetic culmination-expression of feudalism', Shakespeare had nothing to offer democracies.

George Orwell once said some authors were 'worth stealing', a truth demonstrated by both left and right attempting to claim them as their own. But many left-wing Shakespearians now concur with their ideological opponents that this writer naturally - or, at least, regularly - suits a conservative agenda.