Critical Survey

This issue is devoted to the radical and innovative Shakespeare criticism that emerged in Britain in the 1980s; and to the memory of a hugely influential and much-loved leader in the field, Professor Terence Hawkes, who died in 2014.

In the preface to his collection of essays That Shakespeherian Rag (1986) the author reported that ‘an early impulse to call the book Eminent Shakespearians was quietly and efficiently throttled, and I am grateful to its assassins’. Terence Hawkes, who died at the age of 82 on 16 January 2014, could comment wittily on the genesis of a collection of innovative essays that brought together his own unique and distinctive approach to Shakespeare studies with a lifelong love of jazz and poetry. The title was from T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ and was an oblique reference to Hawkes’ own formative hobby as a highly proficient jazz drummer.

Terence Hawkes was an eminent Shakespearean and critical theorist whose career had many facets. He was also a friend and mentor to me, a man who throughout his career countered the class privilege and arbitrary power he had experienced himself at the beginning of his career and which he fought when he saw it at work against others. While his critical work developed over the years in different stages – from humanism to structuralism to poststructuralism to presentism – there were certain constants in all of them: an awareness of language as such, of the power of the critic's present in all readings of works of the past, and of the political and social dimensions of literature and literary criticism. The two of us collaborated in the promulgation of the idea of critical presentism in our 2007 anthology Presentist Shakespeares, but Terence Hawkes' presentist practice can be traced back into some of his earlier works composed well before the term was coined. His 1986 That Shakespeherian Rag can be seen as the beginning of both his pioneering work in deconstructive criticism and in ideas and practices that marked the presentism of his last several books and articles.

Terence Hawkes' insight and encouragement of the Shakespearean scholarship of his colleagues works to dismantle the distinction between elite Shakespeare and other more popular forms of artistic expression. When Sawyer first met Hawkes at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Washington, D.C. in 1997, they had a lively and spirited debate about 'That Shakespearian Rag', the 1912 hit that Eliot alluded to in The Wasteland, which Hawkes used for the title of his 1986 book, and that Sawyer was currently researching in the Library of Congress. What was most striking about the encounter, Sawyer recalls, was the pitch perfect singing of a few lines of the song by Hawkes. One take away from that encounter for Sawyer was that the barriers between the elite and popular needed to be broken down in current Shakespeare studies. The second time Sawyer ran into Hawkes was at the World Shakespeare Congress in Valencia, Spain. During this conversation, Hawkes lamented the lack of humour in current Shakespeare research, asking rhetorically, 'Where are the jokes?' Hawkes helped to realign our thinking about popular culture and Shakespeare by injecting it with a healthy dose of postmodern playfulness. These two encounters led to a lasting friendship that fostered Sawyer's own engagements with popular culture Shakespeare, including publications on topics such as 'Shakespeare and Folk Art', 'Shakespeare and Country Music' and 'Shakespeare and Jerry Lee Lewis'.

Terry Hawkes' seminal essay 'The Heimlich Manoeuvre' forms the basis of this personal tribute, which tries to suggest what is special about his style of criticism, and what his interest in the oral may tell us about the sources of his energy.

This article builds on Terence Hawkes' 'jazz' reading of Hamlet to suggest ways in which music can shed light on radical aspects of Shakespeare's theatrical and linguistic craft. Turning specifically to Hindi cinema and the convention of the 'item number', the article considers the latter's translingualism and how it can help us understand the relations between Shakespeare's own polyglot language and the border-crossing nature of desire in Romeo and Juliet.

While Terence Hawkes is best known as a witty practitioner of post-structural literary theory, his earliest scholarly efforts, such as the edited collection Coleridge on Shakespeare and the student text Structuralism and Semiotics, reveal some of his enduring intellectual traits, which range from a rigorous scholarly method and clear argumentative logic to intellectual generosity.

This article was delivered in the plenary session of the Shakespeare Association of America's annual meeting in St Louis, April 2014, alongside papers from Ania Loomba and Jonathan Dollimore, also for the first time published in this volume. The purpose of the panel was to commemorate and celebrate two important critical texts whose anniversaries fell at that time: Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy, published in 1984, and Political Shakespeare (1985), edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, which went into its second edition in 1994. This article discusses the impact and influence of Political Shakespeare, to which I was a contributor.

This article looks back to the time of Radical Tragedy and Political Shakespeare, the political, historical and philosophical impetus behind those books, and the larger critical practice of cultural materialism, of which they were an expression. It also engages with a recent development in criticism, deriving from the evolutionary sciences, linking it with those earlier books and their concerns via the concept of human nature.

This article offers a reflection on the importance and impact of Jonathan Dollimore's book Radical Tragedy, situating it in the context of the critical and political climate of the 1980s and the author's own engagement with both early modern studies and postcolonial studies. It suggests that the book's engagement with both philosophy and history remains important to both fields today.

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla (New York: Random House, 2009).

Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble, eds, Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre (London: Routledge, 2014).

Jacques Ranciere, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).

David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (London: Palgrave, 2007).

The Demonic: Literature and Experience by Ewan Fernie, foreword by Jonathan Dollimore (Routledge, 2013), xxiii + 312 pp.