Christopher Marlow's new book adds another title to the Arden Shakespeare and Theory series, a useful resource for students and scholars seeking an introduction to the wide variety of theoretical developments that have emerged in Shakespeare studies over the past four decades or so. Marlow's contribution focuses on cultural materialist theory as developed primarily by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield in the 1980s and 1990s. The presentation is clear and accessible, beginning with an overview of the theory, and then surveying some of its primary moves and responding to its critics. The final chapter offers a new cultural materialist reading of Julius Caesar.
The first chapter provides background for the key intervention cultural materialism sought to make in Shakespeare studies at its inception. Marlow distinguishes the approach from “Old Historicism,” beginning with a return to a favorite target of the theory revolution in the figure of E. M. W. Tillyard. Tillyard's penchant for distilling a unified Elizabethan historical worldview from the period's literature is likened to the unifying formalism of influential New Critics of the twentieth century, including L. C. Knights and G. Wilson Knight; Marlow argues that, like Tillyard's, their approach was essentially idealist. This is an important point, as Marlow offers cultural materialism as the antidote to idealist abstraction, arguing that cultural materialist critics reveal how Shakespeare's texts both reflect and produce material rather than abstract cultural conditions. This discussion provides a good background for the second chapter, which focuses on the distinction between cultural materialism and New Historicism. While acknowledging that both approaches initially shared the goal of breaking with formalism by turning to historical context, Marlow argues that New Historicism is primarily concerned with texts while cultural materialism insists on prioritizing the material conditions in which culture is produced. It is not the case, according to Marlow, that one favors subversion and the other containment, though a section of the chapter is devoted to this debate. Rather, he calls out New Historicists for focusing exclusively on textual effects, while lauding the implicitly more politically committed cultural materialists who follow Raymond Williams in exposing material conditions facing both Shakespeare and his present-day readers.
The next chapter details cultural materialism's articulation of the relationship between individual and state power, outlining how individual agency can be seen to function within a cultural and political system that the theory identifies as anathema to individual autonomy. Marlow specifically addresses Neema Parvini's criticism that cultural materialism elides individual agency by grounding its approach in an Althusserian conception of ideological subject formation and discourse analysis in the tradition of Michel Foucault. By identifying Raymond Williams rather than Foucault and Althusser as the theory's primary influence, Marlow holds that agency, while limited, is nevertheless possible.
Chapter 4 focuses on the way cultural materialist readings of Shakespeare can draw attention to the processes of historical-cultural production in order to levy criticism against current political developments. Since a primary goal of cultural materialism is to intervene in the reproduction of oppressive ideological systems, its readings “against the grain” of Shakespeare's texts aim to demonstrate how alternative political possibilities are visible in the plays. A frequent example here is Sinfield's surprising “partial reading” of Macbeth as a representation of revolutionary possibility. Setting aside the play's ostensible point that Macbeth's regicide is the work of an ambitious tyrant, the fact that Macbeth can kill the king at all means that the sovereign is vulnerable to radical action. The political ramifications of this aspect of the cultural materialist project is that the conventional ways that Shakespeare is used to reproduce commonplaces about human nature and normative Western morality can be challenged by the very texts used to teach such lessons. The chapter ends with a look at how classroom practices based on cultural materialist theory can demonstrate this to students.
In the final chapter, Marlow offers a new cultural materialist reading of Julius Caesar. His “partial reading” places an early exchange between two of the people's tribunes and a cobbler alongside Brutus's ruminations on the impending murder of Caesar in a well-known second-act soliloquy. Reading “against the grain” of the play's bleak portrayal of ubiquitous political corruption, Marlow finds evidence of an argument for collective resistance, which he then offers as a possible guide to political action in post-Trump America and the post-Brexit UK. The reading is clear and capable, as is the book as a whole. While readers familiar with cultural materialism may find little new here (as much of the argument dates from the theory's heyday in the 1990s), for those seeking an introduction to cultural materialism this book will be an excellent place to start.
