Theory is valuable to the degree that it enables us to read differently: a nuanced approach shows that the most obvious interpretation is never the whole story. In these essays, brought together here for the first time, world-renowned critic Catherine Belsey puts theory to work in order to register Shakespeare's powers of seduction, together with his moment in history. Teasing out the meanings of the narrative poems, as well as some of the more familiar plays, Shakespeare in Theory and Practice demonstrates the possibilities of an attention to textuality that also draws on the archive. A reading of the Sonnets, written specially for this book, analyses their intricate and ambivalent inscription of desire.
Belsey has been intimately involved with poststructuralism as it has emerged and developed in the English-speaking world. While the earliest essays published here are strongly influenced by Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser, both writers acknowledged a debt to the psychoanalytic account of representation as always unstable, designed at once to reveal and to repress, and Belsey's later work has come to owe more to Lacanian psychoanalysis, in addition to Derridean deconstruction. Between them, these essays trace the progress of theory in the course of three decades, while a new introduction offers a narrative and analytical overview, from a participant's perspective, of some of its key implications.
Written with verve and conviction, this book shows how texts can be seen to offer access to the dissonances of the past when theory finds an outcome in practice.
Key Features
*A very special critic writing on the central figure of English literature
*Provides an exemplary demonstration of poststructuralist theory at work
*Pays particular attention to desire as a theme and as a component of interpretation
*Provides close readings of the texts combining the historical and theoretical

Catherine Belsey is a critic and cultural historian. After an academic career at Cambridge, Cardiff and Swansea, she now visits the University of Derby for discussions with the students. She lives in Cambridge and chairs a range of reading groups in the area on an occasional basis.

Preface; 1. Introduction: Practising with Theory; 2. Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Lacan with Augustine and Montaigne; 3. Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis; 4. Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece; 5. Antinomies of Desire and the Sonnets; 6. Peter Quince's Ballad: Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis, History and A Midsummer Night's Dream; 7. The Illusion of Empire: Elizabethan Expansionism and Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy; 8. Making Histories Then and Now: Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V; 9. The Case of Hamlet's Conscience; 10. Iago the Essayist; Notes; Index.