Modern Mind

eternal theme.’ The new Shakespeareans, if we may call them that, argue on the other hand that although the bard wrote a remarkable number of remarkable plays, he did not, as Coleridge maintained, speak for all men, in all places, and at all times.
    The new scholars say that Shakespeare was a man of his age, and that most, if not all, of his plays had a specific political context. They add too that in the nearly 400 hundred years since his death, successive establishments haveappropriated him for their own essentially right-wing agendas. In other words, far from being an objective fount of fundamental wisdom about our essential nature, Shakespeare has been used by lesser souls as propaganda to promote and sustain a particular point of view. In arguing that Shakespeare was a man of his time, they are also saying that his insights into human nature are no more ‘fundamental’ or ‘profound’ or ‘timeless’ than anyone else’s, and therefore he should forfeit his place as the rock on which English literature is built. For the cultural materialists, as they are called, Shakespeare’s significance is as a battleground for competing views of literature, and its relevance in our lives.
    The first concerted attack on the conventional wisdom came in 1985, in a book edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, from the University of Sussex, which was provocatively entitled
Political Shakespeare
, 58 It comprised a series of eight essays by British and North American scholars; by comparing the chronology of the plays with contemporary political events, the essays were designed to show that, far from transcending history and politics and human nature, Shakespeare was a child of his times. As a result the conventional meaning of many of the plays was changed radically.
The Tempest,
for example, far from being a play about colonialism and America, becomes a play about England’s problems with Ireland. Published in the middle of the Thatcher/Reagan years,
Political Shakespeare
created an academic storm. Two of the academic referees who read the manuscript argued that the book should ‘on no account be published.’ 59 After publication, one reviewer wrote, ‘A conservative critic … may conclude in horror that Shakespeare has succumbed to an academic AIDs, his immunology systems tragically disrupted by Marxist, feminist, semiotic, post-structuralist and psychoanalytic criticism.’ Others found the book important, and in the classroom it proved popular and was reprinted three times. In Annabel Patterson’s
Shakespeare and the Popular Voice,
published in 1989, she argued that until the early nineteenth century Shakespeare was regarded as a political playwright and a rebel, and that it was Coleridge, worried by the ripple effects in England of the French Revolution, who sought to overturn the earlier view, for political reasons of his own. 60 These books provoked such interest that the
London Review of Books
produced a special supplement on the controversy in late 1991.
    The strength of American literature, so evident to Marcus Cunliffe in the 1960s, became even more marked as the postwar decades passed. Its most impressive quality, as new talents continued to emerge, was the staying power of familiar names, and the resilience of their approach to their art.
    The playwright David Mamet, for example, continued in the fine American tradition of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, in that his themes were intimate, psychological dramas, where the ‘action,’ such as it was, took place
inside
the characters as revealed in language. Mamet’s two greatest plays,
American Buffalo
(1975) and
Glengarry Glen Ross
(1983), were once described as indictments of a society ‘in which the business ethic is used as a cover for any kind of criminal activity.’ 61 In
Buffalo
a group of lowlifes plot a robbery that they are totally ‘incapable of carrying out.’ Mamet’s charactersare almost defined by their inarticulateness, which is both a source and a symptom of their desperation. His chosen territory is the modern city and the life-diminishing occupations it throws up – in particular, and here he echoes O’Neill and Miller, the salesman. In
Glengarry Glen Ross,
the pathetic optimism of the real-estate salesmen, which overlays their quiet desperation, is painfully moving, as each tries to do the other down in even the smallest of struggles. This distracts them from recognising their own true