Originating in a conference at the Huntington Library, this collection of essays digests for the study of Shakespeare what the editor calls the New Social History. This term refers mostly to the work of E. P. Thompson and Keith Wrightson, both brilliant, neither exactly new; the broad sweep of New Social History from the Annales School on is not discussed. Annabel Patterson’s 1989 Shakespeare and Popular Culture is also a prominent reference point. In the afterword, Patterson declares she has not changed her mind in the last thirty years: popular Shakespeare “attacks class prejudice” (260), and how one feels about her stance will likely predict one’s reaction to the collection, which consistently understands plays as instrumental political acts. “No one did more than Shakespeare … to publicize” that it was “commonwealth that legitimized the state” (80), declares David Rollison. It “would have been self-evident to the groundlings,” argues Andy Wood, “that, though their rulers felt that scorn went in leather aprons, working people knew there was no better sign of a brave mind than a hard hand” (99). “Poor Tom is an activist project,” insists Chris Fitter, “a serial exposé of government fatuity” (232). For Jeffrey S. Doty, “The Tempest ultimately refuses to ratify Prospero’s coercive exercises of power and retreats from its characterization of Caliban as a natural slave” (250). Not every contributor finds Shakespeare’s plays so politically and poetically unambiguous. Contrasting the rhetorics of popular Antony and virtuous Brutus, Markku Peltonen concludes by wondering, “Can a virtuous orator win at all when it is the common people who ultimately make the decision?” (177). Aided by 110 footnotes, David Norbrook is more blunt: there is “no single answer” (210) to what Jacobean audiences would conclude from Coriolanus; the play demanded “an openness to a remarkable dramatic, political, and historiographical experiment” (211). Thomas Cartelli derides Mark Rylance’s 2012–14 production of Richard III for cutting the political resistance he sees in 2.7, but the heart of his essay beautifully hesitates over the Scrivener’s terrifying analysis of politics: “Why, who’s so gross / That see not this palpable device? / Yet who’s so bold but says he sees it not?”

Its will to political imperative gives this collection a back-to-the-eighties feel, and much of its thrust, though not its theory, recalls Dollimore and Sinfield’s Political Shakespeare (strangely never mentioned). But while Cultural Materialism appropriated Shakespeare’s status as a national icon to attack the two-headed villain of Thatcherism and Reaganism, this collection, though often very angry, lacks such a clear target. In Fitter’s truculent introduction, Stephen Greenblatt’s work in the 1980s (11–13) awkwardly stands in for an otherwise-unnamed enemy; without an antagonist less than thirty years old, his urge to valorize “commoners” as a homogeneous group goes awry in the era of Brexit and Trump voters, whose political allegiances have not proven amenable to drawing clear political sides. The collection is notably Anglocentric: differentiation of commoners by region inside or outside the British Islands is not considered, and the only language spoken besides English is Latin. There is little consideration of whether men and women thought the same thing; notably, only two of the eleven contributors are women.

How to deal with the relations between dramatic art and a historical field remains a dilemma needing more explicit confrontation. Andy Wood thinks the “disciplinary boundaries” between the work of historians and literary critics are “arbitrary” (84). Paola Pugliatti interestingly suggests dramatists may have been “the only mouthpieces of the many strata of society which did not have a public voice of their own” (151). In a revealing moment, Peter Lake reiterates in his final footnote that his discussion of “popularity” “operates at one remove from what one might … call Elizabeth social and political ‘reality’” (62). One remove how? What is the relation between political representation and literary representation? How might one situate this iteration of social history in the vast, heterogeneous Marxist literature on the relation of art and politics and its developments over the last twenty years? These are questions I wish the collection had asked from the beginning.