Alternative Shakespeares, published in 1985, shook up the world of Shakespearean studies, demythologising Shakespeare and applying new theories to the study of his work. Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 investigates Shakespearean criticism over a decade later, introducing new debates and new theorists into the frame.
Focusing on Shakespeare's Hamlet as foremost a study of grief, Alexander Welsh offers a powerful analysis of its protagonist as the archetype of the modern hero. For over two centuries writers and critics have viewed Hamlet's persona as a fascinating blend of self-consciousness, guilt, and wit. Yet in order to understand more deeply the modernity of this Shakespearean hero, Welsh first situates Hamlet within the context of family and mourning as it was presented in other revenge tragedies of Shakespeare's time.
In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. This book, refusing to adopt this approach, instead details the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period. It argues that desire and anxiety constitute the erotic in Shakespearean drama - circulating throughout the dramatic texts, traversing "masculine" and "feminine" sites, eliciting and expressing heterosexual and homoerotic fantasies, embodiments and fears. Taking heterosexuality and homoeroticism equally seriously, the book presents a non-normalizing account of the unconscious and institutional prerogatives that comprise the erotics of Shakespearean drama. Employing feminist, psychoanalytic and new historical methods, using each to interrogate the other, the book implements a synthesis of the psychic and the social, the individual and the institutional. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics in the field of Shakespearean studies, Renaissance literature and cultural, gender studies.
