Epic ambitions are dear to the poetical character. Milton, preoccupied with his election for great purpose, laments in Lycidas not only the death of a friend but also the compulsion the “sad occasion” places upon him to make trial of his powers before “season due”(1-7). In The Prelude, Wordsworth, another chief forebear to Keats's Hyperion project, relates his casting round for heroic matter, “some British theme, some old / Romantic tale by Milton left unsung,” and his settling at last on a “philosophic Song / Of Truth that cherishes our daily life” (1805 text; 1.179-80; 230-31). He was planning a three-part epic, The Recluse, to which this autobiography was a “prelude,” but he completed and published only one part (in nine books) in his lifetime: The Excursion (1814), which Keats knew and absorbed. It was The Prelude, begun in 1798 and published just after his death in 1850, that became Wordsworth's true epic, unfolding the core subject of modernity, the drama of self-consciousness. Citing the precedent of Milton elevating the subject of Paradise Lost above those of classical epics (“argument / Not less but more heroic than the wrath / Of stern Achilles”[9.13-15]), Wordsworth credits his autobiographical “theme” as at least equal: “What pass'd within me” is, “in truth, heroic argument” (Prel. 3.173-74, 182). Keats's involvement with Hyperion would ultimately propel a journey “within,” The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, but with far less certain claims.

All letters involve self-representation, even business letters. The elaborate opening and closing salutations adopted in France show the need for an acute awareness of the social positioning of writer and recipient, but also demonstrate that letters, like any literary form, have generic expectations. Most of Keats's letters are personal, written to friends or family, the idiom allowing for a playfulness, intimacy, and directness usually not appropriate for a business letter - though Keats's letter to his new publishers, Taylor and Hessey, 10 June 1817, is a wittily self-conscious performance to offset the awkwardness of immediately requesting an advance. Any letter is a performance addressed to an absent reader (or readers) at some point in the future. As such, it is a potentially dangerous form, since anyone writing a risk-taking letter (whether a request for a loan, an apology, or a declaration of love) must, if it is to succeed, accurately imagine its recipient's response both to the situation itself and to the words and tone chosen.

Feminism and deconstruction have influenced literary criticism by rethinking the terms of sexual difference, politics and ethics. Emphasising indeterminacy, the openness of interpretation and the importance of difference, their alliance has given rise to powerful interrogations of representations of women across a range of literary fields.

While the alliance between feminism and deconstruction is acknowledged by literary criticism, there is not a simple formula for how they work together. Their relationship takes a variety of shapes, partially because feminism and deconstruction continuously redefine one another. The resulting instability produces a fluid relationship, in which neither term is subordinated.

It is important to note, though, that however many shapes it has the potential to take, the alliance between feminism and deconstruction was initially met with scepticism. In what is probably one of the clearest statements he has ever made, Jacques Derrida claimed that ‘deconstruction is certainly not feminist … if there is one thing that it must not come to, it's feminism’. For Derrida, feminism ‘is the operation through which a woman desires to be like a man, like a dogmatic philosopher, demanding truth, science, objectivity’. Feminism is therefore accused of eliding difference and judged to be just another form of western metaphysics, pinning its hopes on truth and objectivity.

If Derrida has tried to push feminism away from deconstruction, a number of feminists have also attempted to push deconstruction away from feminism, although for a different set of reasons. Deconstruction is against feminism, according to Denise Riley, because it has ‘no political allegiances’.

The lure of euphoric certainty: C. S. Peirce and William James

Pragmatism may not be uniquely American in its origins. The German thinkers F. A. Lange and Hans Vaihinger are pragmatist when they hold that believing something unproven by experiment could still be good for you. G. T. Fechner and the French philosopher Charles Renouvier encouraged William James to believe whatever James found to contribute in the long run to human happiness. Judith Ryan detects in James traces of Austrian thought, namely Ernst Mach: ‘What is valid for me is not what is true, but what I need.’ Whatever its provenance, pragmatism comes to have an instinctive appeal to Americans, with whom common sense comes robustly into play, the same national feature that John Dewey in ‘The Practical Character of Reality’ (1908) will call ‘gumption’ or ‘horse sense’, ‘taking hold of things right end up’. Charles Sanders Peirce says that pragmatism is nothing more than the application of the old saw that ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’, acknowledging James’ view that the value of a concept lies in the future conduct that issues from that concept. The meaning of a belief is the action that the belief makes possible. The Greek word pragma, as James points out, means action. It is a word from which ‘practice’ and ‘practical’ derive. Americans are thought to be both restlessly active and future-oriented, hence the native appeal to them of pragmatism. They are said to be impatient with making unnecessary, impractical distinctions. They are blessedly unreflective and optimistic, hence their resentment at Grübelsucht, a word William James uses to refer to the morbid melancholy brooding supposedly characteristic of Germans.

New historicism emerged in the early 1980s as a turn to history in literary studies after the formalisms of New Criticism, structuralism and deconstruction. The label describes, as Stephen Greenblatt has observed in Learning to Curse (1990), ‘less a set of beliefs than the trajectory’ of related materialist, Marxist and feminist critical practices as they seek to interpret literary works amid the complexities of their own historical moment. An American counterpart to British cultural materialism, its influence has been felt mainly in Renaissance studies, and, to a lesser extent, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies of the novel and Romanticism. Its Renaissance practitioners draw upon diverse strands in modern critical theory (especially Foucault and Althusser), upon the work of cultural historians (by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis) and on social anthropology (especially Clifford Geertz), in order to read across the boundaries of literature and history. So far as it is possible to generalise about such a vast and varied field, new historicists seek to identify hitherto unacknowledged contexts of semiotic exchange between literary and cultural history.

Characteristically self-conscious in method, new historicist criticism frequently voices an acute awareness of its own procedural difficulties. A key problem, for example, has to do with what kind of sense may, indeed should, be made of the materials of literature and history. New historicism represents a sustained negotiation of those complex cultural, textual and political forces which intervene between past and present, then and now. Its central problem has thus to do with distanciation. On the one hand, the past must be minimally intelligible for history to bear any meaning at all; on the other hand, intelligibility always remains relative to the conditions in which interpretations are made.

Keats's final lifetime volume of poetry, published in the summer of 1820, is named for its three romances - Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems - and the title page identifies the poet as “Author of Endymion,” his longest romance of all. Keats and his publishers sought to present him as a narrative poet on a literary scene dominated by popular writers of romances, such as Scott and Byron. This is remarkable, not only because Endymion had been ridiculed, but also because Keats himself had seemed intent to secure his name, like Homer or Milton, through epic. In Sleep and Poetry, the finale to Poems (1817), he imagined bidding farewell to the poetry of delight, “the realm . . . / Of Flora, and old Pan” (101-2), in order to treat “the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts” (124-25), matter for epic or tragedy. This pivot is most revealing, however, in projecting the way Keats's farewells to romance stay dialectically engaged with it. Even his last attempt at epic, The Fall of Hyperion (late 1819), begins in a romance setting, amid the remnants of an Edenic feast, and takes the form of a Dantean dream-vision, a motif from quest-romance. From the 1817 Poems, with its various gestures of romance (“Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry,” begins Specimen of an Induction to a Poem), through Endymion, to the 1820 volume and after, Keats seems always on a quest to write a few fine quest romances.

Shakespeare, Ben Jonson assured us, was 'not of an age but for all time'. He might have added that the many eras and countries beyond his own which have appropriated Shakespeare have done so through their own terms and critical categories. The story of Shakespeare's reception by subsequent generations and societies thus involves complex processes of cultural transmission and recontextualization, a pouring, as it were, of Shakespeare's old wine into new cultural bottles that remarkably transforms the wine as it passes from one era or country to the next. It is a story in which we separate at our peril the dance from the dancer, the work from its interpretation. Until very recently, the story of Shakespeare's reception was almost always told as one in which the world gradually came to terms with Shakespeare's inherent and unchanging greatness, so that the post-Romantic apotheosis of Shakespeare as supreme artist was the fixed telos of the narrative of peoples, eras, and nations. Today, however, the separation between our own critical evaluations and the inherent worth of the works of art we are perceiving is less self-evident, and we are less confident that Shakespeare - or any other artist - is for all times and places.

Seven years after Shakespeare's death his former 'fellows' or colleagues published the first collected edition of his plays, the great Folio of 1623, 'only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare'. Our Shakespeare! The phrase, which has re-echoed down the centuries, was probably in use before his death in 1616. In Spain, a contemporary recorded, Lope de Vega 'is accounted of . . . as in England we should of our Will Shakespeare'. This was how one referred to a classic ('our Virgil', 'our Spenser'), more commonly after his death, and Shakespeare was seen as a classic in his lifetime. The anonymous writer of a preface to Troilus and Cressida (1609) said so quite explicitly: the play deserves a commentary 'as well as the best comedy in Terence or Plautus'.

The friends who published the Folio loved and admired the man as well as his works. Ben Jonson contributed a poem 'to the memory of my beloved, the author, Mr. William Shakespeare', and later wrote, 'I loved the man and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.' He was gentle Shakespeare, sweet Shakespeare, good Will, friendly Shakespeare – that, at least, seems to have been the majority verdict. A minority saw him in a less agreeable light.

When Richard II banishes the nobleman Thomas Mowbray for life, it is not the loss of family, friends, property, or even country that Mowbray laments. It is the loss of language, or rather of his language, the language into which he was born: 'The language I have learnt these forty years, my native English, now I must forgo' (Richard II 1.3.153-4). Mowbray's anticipation of the loss - 'so deep a maim' (150) - turns banishment into as severe a penalty as execution: 'What is thy sentence then but speechless death, / Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?' (166-7). To deprive a man of his language is to deprive him of life itself, for speaking is as necessary to life as breathing. As we learn later when his banishment is repealed, Mowbray does not long survive this death sentence. After having lived out his days in a venture requiring no English, crusading in the Holy Land against 'black pagans, Turks, and Saracens' (4.1.86), he retires to Venice and dies.

When the British monarchy was restored in 1660 and Charles II ended Parliament's eighteen-year ban on public playhouses, he entrusted the task of theatrical restoration to two playwrights who had been active at his father's court. They received patents giving them the exclusive right to perform plays in London and the existing dramatic repertory was divided between them, with the stipulation that it should be 'reformed' - that is, made fit for a stage different from the playhouse of the past. Boy actors were to be replaced by women; scenery and music would create the kind of theatre which, before the war, had been used only for court masques. The history of Shakespeare production for the next 150 years would continue to be one of reform and restoration, though the meanings of these words would be constantly changing.

Theatrical reform was accomplished quickly. The first play to feature a woman actor (as opposed to a singer) was probably Othello; the date may have been 8 December 1660. For those who remembered productions with all-male casts, the mere presence of women, even when they were not much more than animated scenery, must have been as revelatory as all-male productions are today. The scenery itself, like that of the French theatre which was its model, was primarily decorative: one prison scene, one garden scene, and so on, served for the entire repertory. After the scene had been opened by sliding shutters in grooves, the actors normally came forward to play on a projecting apron stage. Because their background could be changed behind them while they remained on stage, the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries could still be played with something of the fluidity of the unlocalized stage for which they were written.

Bibliographies

The reader who wants a more or less complete list of writings on Shakespeare up to 1958 will have to work through four volumes that attempt to provide a comprehensive and systematic record of everything written on the poet and his works. William Jaggard's Shakespeare Bibliography (1911) is not very reliable or systematic, but still useful for the information it contains on early Shakespeare criticism. Its continuation by W. Ebisch and L. L. Schücking, A Shakespeare Bibliography (1931) and Supplement for the Years 1930-35 (1937), is more professional and easier to use, whereas the fourth volume, Gordon Ross Smith's A Classified Shakespeare-Bibliography, 1936-1958 (1963), is rather too complicated in its classification.

An intelligently discriminating list is given in volume one of The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, edited by George Watson (1974), and there are a number of helpful shorter bibliographies. A survey of important titles is provided by A Selective Bibliography of Shakespeare: Editions, Textual Studies, edited by James G. McManaway and Jeanne Addison Roberts (1975); published for the Folger Shakespeare Library, it lists 4,519 items, mainly from 1930 to about 1973.

During much of the twentieth century, scholarly interest in the way that issues of gender and sexuality affect the meaning of Shakespeare tended to take a few limited forms. Many critics made note of his witty and intelligent female characters and lauded his depiction of romantic love. Guides to Shakespeare's 'bawdy language' were published to help readers understand his 'dirty' jokes and puns. And rumours of Shakespeare's own homosexuality circulated among readers of the Sonnets. But not until the late 1970s and early 1980s did critics, motivated by the feminist and gay liberation movements, begin a systematic examination of gender and sexuality in the works of 'the patriarchal bard'. Critical conversation since those initial debates has clarified that the aim of a feminist or 'queer' approach is not to find evidence that Shakespeare was sympathetic to the plight of women, or to berate him for being misogynous, or to prove that he was homosexual. Rather, the analysis of gender and sexuality allows us to understand the variety of ways that Shakespeare responded imaginatively to sex, gender, and sexuality as crucial determinants of human identity and political power.

There are today many conflicting accounts of the origins of Shakespeare's texts and of their subsequent reproduction. Such has not always been the case. For much of the twentieth century, for instance, editors and textual critics accepted and depended upon a single larger story, and most agreed that the few remaining still-contested details would soon be resolved and absorbed into this larger narrative. Today, instead of seeing such resolution, one is hard pressed to find any part of the story that is not in contention.

Editors and textual critics agree that the extant texts of the plays originated in manuscripts that are lost; and they agree that the plays were first printed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, some plays in individual quartos, some in the 1623 Folio, and some in both quarto and Folio. When, however, one looks for consensus beyond these very basic statements, one finds only problems and questions.

'In the south suburbs', Antonio tells Sebastian in Twelfth Night, 'at the Elephant / Is best to lodge' (3.3. 39-40). Illyria may be a geographically remote and fictitious country. Its capital, where the comedy unfolds, often seems to shadow a more familiar city, and not just because there was, in fact, an Elizabethan inn called the Elephant in the High Street of Southwark, that London suburb south of the Thames in which Shakespeare's Globe playhouse stood. Like London, Illyria's capital is close to the sea, and also to wooded country in which its ruler can be urged to divert himself by hunting deer par force - on horseback, with hounds. According to Antonio, Orsino's city is renowned for its 'memorials and the things of fame' (23): churches, private monuments, and public buildings like those John Stow had described with loving care in his great Survey of London (1598/1603). It is a mercantile centre too, its foreign trade sufficiently important that the inhabitants of another state will even compensate for booty taken in war in order not to disrupt so beneficial a peacetime 'traffic'. In many streets, as Antonio alerts Sebastian when lending him his purse, pretty but unnecessary things are displayed for sale, 'idle' luxuries likely to attract a tourist's eye. Then, as Sebastian will soon (momentously) discover, there is the Countess Olivia's mansion, the equivalent of those great residences of the nobility (Somerset House, or Leicester House) which lined the Thames from London proper to Westminster, an abode endowed with gardens, a private chapel, and a large, well-staffed household. Orsino's court too, although ducal rather than royal, is similar to the one at Elizabeth's and then James's Whitehall in being a centre not only of fashion but of government.

Images of racial, national, religious, and cultural difference haunt Renaissance theatricals. Indians and Moors, gypsies and Jews, Ethiopians and Moroccans, Turks, Moors, Jews, 'savages', the 'wild Irish', the 'uncivil Tartars', and other 'outsiders' were repeatedly conjured up on early modern English stages, both public and private. Sometimes such outsiders occupied the centre-stage, in plays such as Shakespeare's Othello, or Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, or in court masques such as Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness, or in the pageants such as Thomas Middleton's Triumphs of Truth which were enacted before the citizens of London when a new Lord Mayor was appointed. At other times they played smaller roles, like the black Moor Aaron in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (whose picture, drawn by Henry Peacham, is the only surviving image from this time of a black character on the stage) or Portia's suitor, the Prince of Morocco, in The Merchant of Venice, whose blackness the upright lady fears and loathes: 'If he have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me' (1.2.109-10). Some were just shadowy presences that were evoked but never appeared on stage such as the 'lovely boy stol'n from an Indian king' over whom Titania and Oberon fight in A Midsummer Night's Dream (2.1.22) or the Moorish woman who, we are told, has been made pregnant by Lancelot in The Merchant of Venice. Sometimes outsiders are only figures of speech, conjured up to establish a point of view: in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, for example, Claudio affirms his decision to marry Leonato's niece whom he has not seen by declaring, 'I'll hold my mind, were she an Ethiope' (5.4.38) and in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lysander spurns Hermia by calling her an 'Ethiope' and a 'tawny Tartar' (3.2.258, 264).

Shakespeare is so deeply ingrained in English-speaking culture, and the appreciation of his work so thoroughly intertwined with the study of the English language, that it seems almost incidental that he is also the world's best-known playwright. Regularly at or near the top of lists of the most performed and most studied dramatists in diverse countries and languages, Shakespeare has been disseminated broadly and incorporated into the lives of people far removed from his homeland and his native tongue. The globalized nature of contemporary culture has expanded the reception of Shakespeare further through material means: widespread sales of the texts for schools by British publishers, world tours by the Royal Shakespeare Company (the first ones occurring in the early 1960s, soon after its founding), and international distribution of films of the plays. Is this a logical result of Shakespeare's overriding genius, another example of English cultural imperialism, or just clever marketing in the post-modern manner?

Though Shakespeare was celebrated as a playwright during his lifetime, he seems to have been almost as well known for his narrative and lyrical poems. His short epics Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece - apparently written while the theatres were closed by plague in 1592-4 - went through numerous editions and were widely quoted and imitated. By 1598, the commentator Francis Meres was comparing his 'mellifluous and honey-tongued' contemporary to the Roman poet Ovid and picking out for approval 'his sugared sonnets among his private friends'. It is possible that Meres was referring to privately circulated poems which have now been lost, but most scholars believe that he had in mind manuscript versions of the sonnets which Shakespeare wrote and revised over several more years until they (or a selection of them) were printed in 1609 in conjunction with his most intricate long poem, 'A Lover's Complaint'. Meanwhile the corpus of indubitably authorial poems was completed in 1601 with the publication of 'The Phoenix and Turtle' - an allegorically suggestive elegy for a couple of birds, which appeared in Robert Chester's enigmatic Love's Martyr alongside lyrics on the same subject by leading poets of the day.