Introduction

Abstract

In a thought-provoking essay that examines how Brecht adapted Shakespeare, Margot Heinemann quotes an interview with the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, in 1983, who claimed that Shakespeare must have been a good Tory.¹ That a British Conservative minister and a German Marxist playwright could each claim Shakespeare as their own is evidence of the way in which generations of readers constantly try to remake his work in their own image, and is also evidence of the very different traditions of reading Shakespeare that lie behind these apparently contradictory viewpoints. To understand this disparity we should ignore the traditional claims for the ‘universal significance’ of Shakespeare’s thought (the ploy of ‘universality’ has so often been used to disguise the real, deep-rooted issues that lie beneath the surface) and look instead at the history of responses to Shakespeare, at the way in which the image of Shakespeare grew and took shape in differing social and historical contexts.

fellowship in a cry of players

Hamlet