For at least six decades, the School of Resentment, as Harold Bloom dubbed it, has “tyrannized conferences and journals with a new orthodoxy” generated by the surprisingly fertile marriage of Marx and Freud. Critics “eager to vent their righteous indignation” turned Shakespeare studies into an ideological battlefield, and Shakespeare’s texts into mere pretexts. Shakespeare himself, a Christian white male who died four hundred years ago, was approached with attitudes varying “from suspicion to condescension”. Killjoy Marxism imposed “partisan or authoritarian readings”, whose main goal was not to tell us anything relevant about Shakespeare, but to uncover ever new forms of exploitation.

The trinity class-race-sex (or gender, to be politically correct) proved too meagre for the hunger of academics in search of topics for dissertations, first and second books, conference papers and articles in peer-reviewed and well indexed periodicals. Shakespeare, “the man who pays the rent,” became immaterial; what mattered was finding something new to say – however bizarre, but new. Cultural materialist, feminist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, queer, ecocritical, ecofeminist, posthumanist, posthuman, presentist studies found angles to denounce the exploitation of someone or something by the white capitalist males.

Intersections may be new (who would have thought of ecofeminism?), but theories are old. All we get is fifty shades of Marx – a tedious argument of insidious intent about agency, power, exploitation and subversion. “Like racism and misogyny, with which it is often allied, ecophobia is about power”, one ecocritic (of Shakespeare!) admits. But how does this concern Shakespeare? What next?

My talk will walk the audience through the thickets of Shakespeare studies, and will attempt to distinguish authoritarian from authoritative readings. It will also suggest a few ways out, leading from the excesses of theory back towards erudition, exegesis, and genuine enjoyment of Shakespeare on page and stage, and in class.