Introduction: Marx and Shakespeare: A Continuing Process

There has been a long and variegated tradition within literary studies of critics reading and interpreting Shakespeare under the influence of the ideas of Karl Marx. Some of them have called themselves Marxists, and some have not. The enterprise has been in process for over 150 years and shows no signs of ceasing. This preoccupation of Marxists of various stripes with Shakespeare recurs in every generation, discarding elements of the past and generating new insights. On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, the essays presented in this special issue of Shakespeare: A Journal continue this process into our own time. In an era of an economic, political and cultural crisis unfolding in an electronically connected global system, these writers have turned both to Shakespeare and to Karl Marx to help us understand our own time and situation, but also to reinterpret Shakespeare’s classic works and test Marx’s ideas in the process. David Hawkes examines the early modern debates on usury as providing uncanny prefigurations of our own economic situation. Don Hedrick places Shakespeare’s theatre in a history of commodified “entertainment” that evolves steadily over the centuries to become a central feature of twenty-first-century global culture. A. Crunelle Vanrigh returns to the question of the relation of King Lear to the transition to capitalism explored in several works of Marx, and Thomas Cosgrove investigates the various acts of exchange in A Comedy of Errors and their connections to Marx’s description of the dynamics of exchange systems in capitalism. In addition, we have commissioned essays for the Performance section of this issue that seek to use Marxist perspectives in evaluating performance history and contemporary productions of the plays. Rachel Holmes presents an essay exploring Karl Marx’s and his family’s engagement with Shakespearean Theatre. Terrell Carver discusses the relevance of Marx’s political work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon to a recent staging of Coriolanus, Andrew Jarvis and John Drakakis provide an assessment of the “Marxism” of the late Shakespearean director Michael Bogdanov, and there are reviews of contemporary Shakespeare productions by Dan Venning (of Ivo van Hove’s staging of the Roman tragedies and English histories) and Peter Danelski (of a recent production of Timon of Athens at the Folger in Washington, DC). These efforts are but part of a continuous process since Marx’s early uses of Shakespeare exploring their interconnections. This process has generated a series of “chips of time” – moments that flash up at us from the past that show both continuities and profound differences from attempts in our own day to use Marx to understand Shakespeare. The articles of this special issue, as well the larger Marx-influenced critical environment from which they spring, show how much the protean entity “Marxism” has been redefined, rethought and reapplied. We are dealing with two authors whose works are apparently inexhaustible and require reinterpretation in each new generation. However, there have also been continuities that justify placing them in a single, if complex, line of development.