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Shakespeare: The Aesthetics of Materialism and the Materialism of Aesthetics

This is a substantial review article, commisioned by the editors of an internationally respected Shakespeare journal, and has much to do with the politics and the aesthetics of Shakespeare Criticism but that also impinges on some aspects of performance. It addresses in some detail a number of current issues in the field of Shakespeare scholarship. It builds on Drakakis’s work on the Arden 3 Merchant, and focuses on the issue of ‘money’ and the politics of representation, while at the same time providing a critical appraisal of one of the most significant recent attempts to formulate a radical aesthetics derived from the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno, that can be applied to Shakespearean texts. The essay addresses critically some of the most difficult areas of aesthetic theory, and establishes links between two nuanced, but different kinds of materialist criticism.