Some years ago the neurologist Oliver Sacks met an autistic child called Stephen Wiltshire. Like most autistic people, Stephen seemed to lack any real sense of an inner self. That meant that he had no idea that other people might have inner selves; he had, as cognitive psychologists would say, no theory of mind. This lack of mind theory makes it difficult for autistic people to communicate with others. The physical signals that most of us respond to intuitively, and that act as clues to what's going on in someone else's mind, mean nothing to them. They seem to be indifferent to other people's feelings. But Stephen had an extraordinary talent. Just as some musical idiots savants can play a piece of music note-for-note after a single hearing, Stephen was able to draw architecturally complex buildings from memory with total recall. These delicate and beautiful drawings were a best-seller when they were published as a book called Floating Cities in 1991. Talking to Stephen, Sacks was struck by the paradox of a person who had such prodigious gifts and such an apparent void within. So strange was this paradox that he asked himself if it was possible for a classically autistic person to be an artist in the conventional sense of the term. That set him thinking about the whole question of creativity.

‘Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?’ (The Merchant of Venice, iii.i.55–6). Shylock's most famous speech has been read by many critics as a defence of the persecuted outsider. With its powerful rhetoric and its sense of the dignity of the human spirit, this is one of Shakespeare's great set pieces, comparable with Henry V's meditation on the cares of kingship, or even Hamlet's soliloquy on suicide. Appealing, as he does, to a universal humanity that transcends ethnic and cultural differences, Shylock comes across, not just as the victim of Christian prejudice, but as a tragic figure of almost heroic proportions. Yet within half a dozen lines he has metamorphosed into a pantomime buffoon. As Tubal's ‘bad’ news of Jessica's betrayal alternates in symmetrical sequence with the ‘good’ news of Antonio's misfortunes, Shylock's ludicrously exaggerated reactions make him an obvious target for the mockery of the street boys who follow ‘crying “His stones, his daughter, and his ducats!”’ (ii.viii.24). What are we to make of such contradictory images? Was Shakespeare sympathetic to the Jewish outsider? Or did he share the anti-Semitism that was the norm in late medieval and Renaissance Europe?

It's understandable that, after the greatest crime against humanity in recorded history, twentieth-century criticism should have been preoccupied with Shakespeare's treatment of the Jewish question (even to the extent of claiming that Shakespeare himself was a Jew).

Postmodernists do not share Noam Chomsky's views on human nature. Cultural Materialists and New Historicists believe that talk of innate structures of mind or intrinsic human needs is no more than ideological mystification; in reality there are as many forms of human nature as there are human societies. ‘Constructionism’, writes one leading American Shakespeare scholar, ‘is one of the basic propositions by which new historicism as a way of reading has distinguished itself from humanism. Where humanism assumes a core essence that unites people otherwise separated in time and social circumstances new historicism insists on cultural differences.’

One of the defining features of civilised states that distinguishes them from many primitive societies, and a few modern fundamentalist religious ones, is the existence of laws that deny individuals the right to take personal revenge for crimes against themselves or their families. In Hamlet a Viking code of heroic values (represented by Fortinbras and the ghost of Old Hamlet) is contrasted with Horatio's philosophic stoicism. The former valorises retaliatory vengeance, the latter an indifference to misfortune. In Othello the Venetian republic – famed for its legendary political wisdom – is threatened by the forces of barbarism in the form of the Ottoman empire; the two are symbolically brought together when the soldier charged with defending Venice against the barbarian, resorts not to a court of law, but to an archaic honour code in satisfaction of a supposed wrong. While humanists saw their task as the defence of civilisation against barbarism, they believed that the greatest danger didn't always come from an external enemy. The archetypal example of a city that fell as a result of help from within was Troy. In both Hamlet and Othello the ultimate threat to state security comes, not from an invading power, but from within the city gates. Though both tragedies reflect humanist distrust of heroic values, it's only in Hamlet that there's any talk of the liberal arts, and even then Hamlet seems more interested in heroic poetry than in the civilising power of the arts.

Why did Shakespeare dramatise stories from the ancient world? If you asked a late Elizabethan historiographer that question he would probably say that Shakespeare went to Roman history for much the same reason that contemporary historians retold the story of the past, namely, that history is a storehouse of political lessons that can be applied to the modern world. Since human nature was thought to be much the same in all ages, an understanding of the reasons why people behaved as they did in the past could help you to understand the political problems of the modern world. In his Discourses on Livy Machiavelli wrote: ‘If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were. So that, if one examines with diligence the past, it is easy to foresee the future of any commonwealth, and to apply those remedies that were used of old.’ Machiavelli's ‘politic’ historiography was fashionable in England in the final decades of the sixteenth century and had begun to replace the older providentialist school of history that looked for the meaning of events in God's will. ‘You cannot step into a scholar's study but (ten to one) you shall likely find open either Bodin's de Republica or Le Roye's Exposition upon Aristotle's Politics or some other like French or Italian Politic Discourses’, wrote Gabriel Harvey in about 1580.

Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a work of extraordinary imaginative power. Its influence on postmodern Shakespeare criticism can hardly be exaggerated. For a time in the 1980s and 1990s it was impossible to open a collection of Cultural Materialist or New Historicist essays without finding an analysis of this Elizabethan play as a epitome of the carceral society, or that Jacobean play as covert legitimation of state violence through the production and containment of subversion. Through his gifted populariser Stephen Greenblatt, Foucault spoke to a generation of Shakespeareans in a way that no other analyst of bourgeois society had done before. In this chapter I'll discuss a classic Foucauldian reading of Measure for Measure that sees the play as a dramatic picture of a police state in-the-making where citizens are subjected to new forms of surveillance, and delinquent sexuality is produced as a way of justifying more punitive forms of social control. Does a presentist reading of this kind need to justify its claims by reference to the text itself with its structural parallels and contrasts, verbal patterning, biblical motifs, and other artistic devices by which meanings are generated? Probably not. If your ultimate purpose is not to recover unfamiliar ways of thinking, but to enlist Shakespeare as a spokesman for postmodern theories of culture, then there's no reason to be bound by the text. ‘Creative’ reading against the grain is a perfectly acceptable procedure in postmodern literary criticism. What is important, I shall argue, is to be clear about the difference between a presentist and an historicist approach.

‘And what are you reading, Miss –?’ ‘Oh! it is only a novel!’, replies the young lady, trying to hide her embarrassment. The narrator supplies the rejoinder that the imaginary young reader lacks the wit or the experience to come up with herself: ‘in short, only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language’.

Shakespeare would have had no idea what Jane Austen was talking about; her ironic defence of the novelist's art would have completely passed him by. It's not just that novels as we know them didn't exist in Elizabethan England; human nature didn't exist either. At least, that's what postmodernism tells us. In postmodern Shakespeare criticism it's taken for granted that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were anti-essentialists. That is to say, Elizabethans are thought to have had no general theory of humankind as a species: human beings had no existential ‘centre’; they lacked any kind of unifying essence; they were ‘frail, precarious, dispersed across a range of discourses’. The idea of a humankind with universal characteristics and a more or less coherent inner self is something that didn't appear in Europe for another fifty years or so. This anti-essentialist view of humanity affected the way people wrote, their theories of authorship and originality, the way they thought about selfhood and gender, their view of history, and their attitude to authority. It informed their whole world view.

In no other Elizabethan play are love and death so closely intertwined. In his opening sonnet the Chorus of Romeo and Juliet tells us that the young couple's love has the mark of death on it (9). No sooner have the lovers met than they start thinking about death. That Romeo, as an aspiring Petrarchist, should have premonitions of ‘untimely death’ cutting short a ‘despised life’ (i.iv.110–11) is only to be expected: it goes with the role. As Mercutio puts it, ‘Alas, poor Romeo, he is already dead: stabb'd with a white wench's black eye’ (ii.iv.13–14). But Juliet too is preoccupied with death. At first she wonders how she will cope if it should turn out that Romeo isn't free: ‘If he be married, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed’, she tells her Nurse (i.v.132–3). When she learns that Romeo is a Montague it seems as if the old Petrarchan conceit about the dear enemy has come horribly true:

Surprised to hear Juliet talking in Petrarchan couplets, the Nurse asks her what's going on. Juliet admits that it's something she's picked up from Romeo: ‘A rhyme,’ she says, ‘I learnt even now / Of one I danc'd withal’ (140–1).

Let me begin by summarising the argument I set out in my Introduction. Anti-humanism, or anti-essentialism as it's usually termed, is the core theoretical principle of postmodern Shakespeare criticism. It's true that Cultural Materialism makes a particular point of studying literary texts in their historical context. But so too did pre-theoretical historical scholarship. And contrary to what is uniformly claimed in postmodern Shakespeare criticism, twentieth-century historicists had a thoroughly sophisticated understanding of the problems involved in reconstructing the past (see below, pp. 188–9). It's anti-essentialism, rather than an interest in historical context, that chiefly distinguishes Cultural Materialism from older forms of historical scholarship. It's also, despite the claim that it signalled ‘the return of history in literary criticism’, what principally marks New Historicism off from earlier twentieth-century forms of literary historicism. Jean Howard is right when she says that the key to what's new about New Historicism is ‘the basic issue of what one assumes to be the nature of man’; central to postmodern historicism on both sides of the Atlantic is ‘the attack on the notion that man possesses a transhistorical core of being. Rather, everything from “maternal instinct” to conceptions of the self are now seen to be the products of specific discourses and social processes.’ We know that this is true (as Howard says, it's something we can ‘assume’), not because of what we might deduce from research into the mental capabilities of neonatal infants before they've had a chance to absorb culture, clinical experiments designed to test mind theory, cross-cultural studies of gender differences in a wide variety of urban and rural communities, or the epidemiology of culture (how ideas spread), but because, as Howard explains, we have it on Foucault's authority.

During the Long Parliament England's puritan revolutionaries conducted an experiment: they tried to change human nature. In June 1647 Parliament decreed that Christmas, along with Easter, Whitsun and all the other traditional festivals of the Church year, was to be abolished. Wakes, feasting, dancing, church ales, Christmas holly bushes and unseemly merry-making had no place in the new godly society, so they were made illegal. The experiment failed. The puritan revolution could no more stamp out people's natural love of feasting, merry-making and dancing than the nineteenth-century English public school system could obliterate adolescent boys' obsession with sex. So unpopular were the government's attempts to suppress Christmas celebrations that in 1646 protestors took over the streets of Canterbury, set up holly bushes outside their houses, gave out free drinks, and broke open the city gaol. The militia had to be brought in to quell the riots.

Though Christmas festivities weren't legally abolished until 1647, the puritan campaign against the old Church rituals goes back to the Reformation. Evangelical clergy attacked anything that had a taint of the old religion. Because the seasonal festivals were so closely linked with Catholicism, they had to go. Despite the revival of pre-Reformation customs under Mary, seasonal celebration declined over the second half of the century. Between 1584 and 1586 there was a parliamentary campaign to reform the Church.

Renaissance humanists believed that if you want to build a just society you must begin with the facts of human nature. This book argues that the idea of a universal human nature was as important to Shakespeare as it was to every other Renaissance writer. In doing so it questions the central, defining principle of postmodern Shakespeare criticism. By ‘postmodern’ I mean criticism that's informed by what is generally termed ‘Theory’ (either spelt with a capital letter, or enclosed by inverted commas, or both, to distinguish it from the literary theory that existed before Barthes, Derrida and other French thinkers began to dominate Anglo-American criticism in the late 1960s). There are of course significant differences between Cultural Materialism and New Historicism, and between different kinds of feminism; where necessary I'll try to make these differences clear. But since anti-essentialism – the belief that there is no such thing as a universal essence of human nature – is a core principle shared by most versions of ‘Theoretically’-informed criticism (but not by liberal feminism), I thought it best to avoid repetition of awkward lists of titles of critical schools by using the general term ‘postmodern’ when writing about critics who claim that Shakespeare was an anti-essentialist. However, with the exception of chapter 9, where I consider Althusser and Foucault and the strange history of anti-essentialism, I've tried to keep discussion of ‘Theory’ to a minimum.

Why did Shakespeare use stories from the Graeco-Roman world? Machiavelli went to Roman history because he believed that Livy’s narratives provided political lessons that could be applied to the modern world. It has traditionally been supposed that Shakespeare dramatized stories from Plutarch and other historians for similar reasons. For the new ‘politic’ historiographers, and, it used to be generally assumed, for Shakespeare as well, the importance of ancient history lay in its ability to illuminate modern events. In recent years these assumptions have been challenged by materialist and postmodern scholars who have argued that the supposedly essentialist view of humanity underpinning this rational historiography is an invention of pre-theoretical literary scholarship. Shakespeare, it is claimed, was a precursor of our own disillusioned postmodern view of ‘man’ and history. Julius Caesar certainly suggests that Shakespeare took a sceptical view of politics. But evidence in the play in support of the claim that he shared the anti-humanist theories of the postmodern historiographers he is said to anticipate is less strong.

IN the final two decades of the twentieth century the study of early modern English culture was revitalised in two ways: by new methodologies; and by the revision, employing a largely traditional methodology, of conventional thinking about Elizabethan and Stuart England. Broadly speaking – we will consider some exceptions later – it was literary critics who could claim credit for new theoretical approaches, while historians worked within a more conventional methodological framework to challenge a Whig view of the early modern period. There has been surprisingly little contact between the two disciplines.

The beginning of a new century is an appropriate time to consider the future direction of historical scholarship, and at the same time to ask what historians and literary critics can learn from each other. But as any historicist would argue, in order to evaluate the present we need to understand the history of our own disciplines. ‘To judge rightly of the present,’ wrote Samuel Johnson, ‘we must oppose it to the past.’ We will begin this Introduction with a survey of historicism in literary and historical studies.

It is a widely held view among early modern literary scholars that New Historicism and Cultural Materialism represent a significant advance on earlier forms of historicism which were, it is claimed, naive and theoretically unsophisticated. ‘What now seems the central problem of historicist interpretation,’ writes Hugh Grady in a recent book on Shakespeare,‘ – how to deal adequately with the otherness of the past, given the unavoidability of perceiving it through our own epistemological ‘‘lenses’’ – was barely recognized by the earlier historicists.’ In view of the long history of debate among historians and literary critics on precisely this question, Grady’s assertion is a a puzzling one.

Historicism is a confusing term because it has been used by different writers to mean diametrically opposite views of history. For Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) and his eighteenth-century predecessors such as Herder and Winkelmann, the historian should not allow his own assumptions, attitudes and beliefs to enter into his judgment of the past: every epoch, each cultural moment, is unique and must be interpreted in terms of its own values. By the middle of the nineteenth century the term Historismus had come to be used to describe this approach to history.