Shakespeare in Theory and Practice
Catherine Belsey
'All of the essays attest to Belsey's career-long commitment to theory and its ability to deliver new ways of reading ... Her attention in this collection to materiality and wordplay is indicative of her considerable skills as a close reader.'
Shakespeare Survey
'These are essays of love, as well as about love, and this makes them unusually sensitive... Belsey's insistence on the anarchy of desire seems both timely and genuinely radical.'
Times Literary Supplement
In these essays, brought together here for the first time, world-renowned critic Catherine Belsey puts theory to work in order to demonstrate the possibilities of an attention to textuality that also takes account of history. She teases out the meanings of the narrative poems, as well as some of the plays, while a reading of the Sonnets, written specially for this book, explores their subtle power to seduce.
Belsey has been a vital figure in poststructuralist theory as it has developed in the English-speaking world. The introduction offers a participant's narrative and analytical overview of three decades of psychoanalysis and deconstruction.
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.
Catherine Belsey is Research Professor of English at Swansea University. She is author of Critical Practice (1980, 2002) and Culture and the Real (2005). Her most recent book is Why Shakespeare? (2007).

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.