Lecture examines politics of Shakespeare

The recent hostile intellectual atmosphere towards William Shakespeare will be examined in a free University of Queensland public lecture on Thursday, October 4.

Dr Peter Holbrook, a senior lecturer in UQ's School of English, Media Studies and Art History will discussWilliam Shakespeare, Fascist at the lecture in Mayne Hall, St Lucia.

The Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies lecture at 5.30pm is part of a program of free public lectures by researchers from the University's Faculty of Arts.

Dr Holbrook said "something profound" happened to Shakespearean criticism in the 1980s and 1990s: it became hostile to the author it once adored.

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94

"Like the disenchanted speaker of Shakespeare's Sonnets, who once idealized his beloved young man but now knows that 'loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud', critics have had to face up to their author's failings- particularly ideological failings," he said.

"As Michael Bristol puts it: 'Recent research demonstrates how Shakespeare has been enlisted by a social and economic regime to serve the interests of a white, Christian, middle-class, predominantly male and heterosexual mainstream'. The negative critique is now standard: the Shakespeare of Katherine Duncan-Jones's recent biography is a grain-hoarder in time of dearth, a misogynist, and fat.

"Defences of the poet, such as Harold Bloom's best-selling book, usually take the form of crude dismissals of political criticism. The charge that Shakespeare is a force for 'social discipline' (Bristol) won't go away so easily. Thus, it seems, we are doomed to dislike what we once enjoyed."

Dr Holbrook said his paper suggested a different story could be told about the politics of Shakespeare. It did so by examining some moments in Shakespeare's cultural influence between his time and today.

Dr Holbrook writes about English Renaissance poetry and drama but also about literature more widely. His publications include a book about Elizabethan literature and social class, and one (edited with David Bevington) on courtly entertainment in 17th-century England. He also writes cultural and literary criticism for newspapers and magazines.

Media: For further information, contact Dr Peter Holbrook, telephone 07 3365 3215, Website: http://arts.uq.edu.au/cccs/events/lectures/Holbrook/index.html or Andrea Mitchell at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, telephone 3365 7182.