1. Unfinished Business: Problems in Cultural Materialism 2. Pastoral, As You Like It, and the Ideology of Literary History 3. Poetaster, The Author, and the Perils of Cultural Production 4. How to Read The Merchant Of Venice Without Being Heterosexist 5. Cultural Materialism And Intertextuality: The Limits of Queer Reading in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen 6. Effeminacy, Friendship and the Hero in Marlowe and Shakespeare 7. Near Misses: Ganymedes and Pageboys 8. Sex and the Lyric: Sidney, Barnfield, Marlowe 9. What Happens in Shakespeare's Sonnets 10. Rape and Rights: Measure For Measure and the Limits of Cultural Imperialism 11. Unfinished Business: Reprise Bibliography Index

Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality is a powerful reassessment of cultural materialism as a way of understanding textuality, history and culture, by one of the founding figures of this critical movement. Alan Sinfield examines cultural materialism both as a body of ongoing argument and as it informs particular works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, especially in relation to sexuality in early-modern England and queer theory.
The book has several interlocking preoccupations:
theories of textuality and reading
the political location of Shakespearean plays and the organisation of literary culture today
the operation of state power in the early-modern period and the scope for dissidence
the sex/gender system in that period and the application of queer theory in history.
These preoccupations are explored in and around a range of works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Throughout the book Sinfield re-presents cultural materialism, framing it not as a set of propositions, as has often been done, but as a cluster of unresolved problems. His brilliant, lucid and committed readings demonstrate that the 'unfinished business' of cultural materialism - and Sinfield's work in particular - will long continue to produce new questions and challenges for the fields of Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies.