From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>

> Kott is rather more than "touching", I would think: he's a perceptive
> critic of theatre and especially of Shakespeare. He didn't write
> _Radical Tragedy_, it was someone else whose name I forget (English,
> I think). A while since I read it. I was kind of hoping someone
> who'd read it more recently than me and could remember the author
> would pipe up here...

Authors -- Dollimore and Sinfield. It's part of the British version of The
New Historicism, coming out of Lever's (much) earlier _The Tragedy of
State_. Crossed with Foucault, which is where the Brit version of NH
lives -- it's more Marxist than the American variety, for which see Steven
Greenblatt.

Strictly, I suppose, D&S ought to be called Cultural Materialists, but
bugger me if I could ever tell the difference between the Brit and Yank
varieties.

There is a rather cutting put-down remark by an American woman whose name I
currently forget (she did a book on Renaissance metrics) that the New
Historicism is nobut anecdotal history. Bit of truth in that, but.

As to the general issue, I'm with dave on this (and dear god I SWORE I
wouldn't get involved) --depends on when you slice the cake. At the last
(leaving aside HVIII) you can see _The Tempest_ as Shakespeare's Final
Statement on politics -- all government is slavery. (All three of Ariel,
Ferdinand and Caliban are called slaves.) Pretty bloody subversive that,
for all of me.

Also I don't think it's entirely possible to make a sharp divide between the
history plays and the rest. {And that's totally ignoring the quarto/folio
mess over the titles.} A bit of it was when stage-censorship REALLY clamped
down in the late 1590s, Bill shifted from British history to Roman History.
With the advantage that he could (just barely) be a bit more radical than
before -- it was possible to dramatise the good king/bad king issue using
English material (RII and all that) but to raise the question of Who Needs
Kings At All? he had to go to Plurarch, and JC.

As to _Coriolanus_ -- Al Alvarez described Marvell's "Horatian Ode" as the
second-finest political poem in English. Guess which he saw as the best?

Robin