This essay resurveys the main assumptions and practices used in the new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to Shakespeare.
With the development of Marxist and Foucauldian theories, socio-political interpretation has become cent ...

This essay resurveys the main assumptions and practices used in the new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to Shakespeare.
With the development of Marxist and Foucauldian theories, socio-political interpretation has become central to Shakespeare studies. As a vigorous political approach, new nistorical study was concerned with the reciprocal relationship between the text and the social. By historicizing the texts, new historicists blurred the distinction between literature and history. They assume that texts are inscriptions of history both for the author and for the reader. Because all texts are ideologically marked, texts should be illuminated by the study of their relations to the cultural contexts.
In our reading of Shakespeare, we can explore the political functions of his texts within specific historical contexts. And we recognize Shakespearean plays reveal the strategies of subversion, conflicts and struggles for power, while Tillyard perceived a carefully worked out vision of harmony, stability and unity through the texts.
There are three aspects of historical process-consolidation, subversion and containment in the interplay of culture and power. New historicists emphasize the hegemonic capacity of the dominant ideology to contain and control subversive moves. They focus on the condition of power even to produce subversiveness in order to contain it. In contrast, cultural materialists find the possibilities for effective resistance or subversion in Renaissance literary works. By such means, text is a site for the contestation as well as for the reproduction of ideological dominants. Because text is not only socially produced but also socially productive, the versions of texts can be appropriated and transformed.
Even if there's no systematic paradigm for the new historical approaches, the attempt of new historicism has established a new way of literary study during the past two decades. So Shakespearean plays are to be reappraised through a complete re-reading of the texts. And we need to re-read texts so as to amplify the voices of the ruled, exploited, oppressed and excluded.