Is Shakespeare really our contemporary? What relevance can literature written in the 16th century have for us today?
In Shakespeare After Theory, literary critic David Scott Kastan argues that Shakespeare's value for us must first begin with the acknowledgement of his distance from us. Otherwise we never can be sure that what we hear are his concerns, rather than projections of our own. Kastan sees Shakespeare's artistry in the earliest conditions of its making: in the collaborations of the theatre in which the plays were acted, in the practices of the book trade in which they were published, and in the unstable political world of late Tudor and Stuart England in which the plays were performed for the public. A response to recent theory that insists literary value and meaning are contestable and contingent, Shakespeare After Theory aims to recognize the radical historicity of literature itself and restore Shakespeare's plays to the rich densities of the world that created them.
