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Shakespeare after Theory (review)

This volume deserves to be placed at the forefront of some of the most promising developments in today’s Shakespeare scholarship and criticism. After the recent upheaval in the field has made porous a good many traditional boundaries between textual scholarship and historical criticism, David Scott Kastan, a distinguished participant in this project, now proceeds toward new perspectives on both its gains and its losses. His previous work uniquely qualifies him not just to raise the question “Where are we now?” but to submit answers that lead us beyond certain liabilities in the theoretically charged work of the recent past. As coeditor of A New History of Early English Drama (1997), editor of A Companion to Shakespeare (1999), and general editor of the Arden Shakespeare, Kastan has made an unequaled contribution to what, for want of a better word, may be called a post-poststructuralist approach to the Elizabethan theater. But if the book’s title (un)ambiguously accentuates the new departure, it also may for some readers invite misunderstandings. Rather than postulate a new approach after the end of theory, Kastan—deeply committed to materialist thought and method—redefines the ends and means by which theory can more effectively serve the study of literary and theater history. In this view, theory per se is not “bad”; it is not “sucking the life from common sense, intelligibility, and objectivity,” and, of course, it “cannot be held responsible for the demise of literature” (24). That the conservative critique of theory “is, for the most part, disingenuous and inaccurate,” however, must no longer obscure the fact that “another critique of theory is possible and indeed necessary at this time” (25–26). Such a critique aims at theory’s imperial, somehow idealistic project to “offer convincing alternatives” to the “necessary specification of [what Louis Montrose calls] ‘the processes by which meaning and value are produced and grounded’” in social and cul-