Shakespeare and Literary Theory

How is it that the British literary critic Terry Eagleton can say that "it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, and Derrida?" Shakespeare and Literary Theory argues that literary theory is less an external set of ideas anachronistically imposed on Shakespeare's texts than a mode--or several modes--of critical reflection inspired by, and emerging from, his writing. To name just a few examples: Karl Marx used Timon of Athens to illustrate aspects of his economic theory; psychoanalytic theorists from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan have explained some of their most axiomatic positions with reference to Hamlet; Jacques Derrida's deconstructive philosophy is articulated in dialogue with Shakespeare's plays; French feminism's best-known essay is Hélène Cixous's meditation on Antony and Cleopatra; and postcolonial theory owes a large debt to Aimé Césaire's revision of The Tempest. By reading what theoretical movements have had to say about and in concert with Shakespeare, we can begin to get a sense of how much the DNA of contemporary literary theory contains a startling abundance of chromosomes that are of Shakespearian provenance.