Presentist Shakespeare

Although an emphasis on history or historical context has been very important in recent Shakespeare scholarship, no critics are able to make direct contact with a past unadulterated by their own contemporary concerns. By the same token, all experience of the present is moulded by the past. Presentist Shakespeares is the first extended study of the principles and practice of '¬~presentism', a critical movement that takes account of the never-ending dialogue between past and present, seeking out salient aspects of the present as a trigger for its investigations and arguing that an intrusive, shaping awareness of ourselves deserves not condemnation but our closest attention. In this bold and consistently thought-provoking collection of presentist readings, the contributors: argue that the ironies generated by our involvement in time are a fruitful, necessary and unavoidable aspect of any text's being, and that presentism allows us to engage with them more fully and productively demonstrate how these ironies can function as agents of change, flowing unstoppably back into the events of the past, colouring how we perceive them and modifying our sense of what they signify show that a critics' inability to step beyond time and specifically their present does not, as has been argued elsewhere, '¬~contaminate' readings of Shakespeare's plays, but rather points to shades of implication suddenly available here and now within the wide range of plays examined suggest that presentism might not merely challenge or expand our sense of what Shakespeare's plays are able to tell us, but may in fact offer the only effective purchase on these texts that is available to us. Presentist criticism is an open-ended and on-going project, located at a particularly interesting and demanding juncture in modern Shakespeare studies. Its boundaries remain to be defined. At this crucial point, then, Presentist Shakespeares is certainly a compelling collection of readings by a distinguished team of authors, but it is also much more: it is a landmark, which reflects, develops and even rejoices in the intedeterminacy of the field. Contributors include Catherine Belsey, Michael Bristol, Linda Charnes, John Drakakis, Ewan Fernie, Evelyn Gajowski, Hugh Grady, Terence Hawkes and Kiernan Ryan.Grady, Hugh is the author of 'Presentist Shakespeare ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780415385299 and ISBN 0415385296.