A battle of Wills

Former enfant terrible of Shakespearean scholars Terence Hawkes is now part of the establishment, but a new battleground is emerging.

It was all very civilised. In the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford, on the shade-dappled lawn, delegates at the International Shakespeare Conference sipped white wine and chatted to the contributors to Alternative Shakespeares 2, edited by Terence Hawkes. The book launch was one of the main events of the week-long, invitation-only conference. "Only those who have published widely on Shakespeare can attend," the institute's receptionist told me sternly, a few days earlier. As a result, it was a star-studded cast on the lawn presided over by the genial figure of Hawkes, enthusiastically bringing people together and making them laugh.

The hawk, it seemed, had turned dove. For a long time, Cardiff University professor Hawkes has been seen as the enfant terrible of Shakespeare studies. His Marxist ideas, that "Shakespeare is a product of a particular historical moment" and that what is interesting about Shakespeare is how he has been "used" over the centuries, aimed to challenge those who held the orthodox notion of Shakespeare which had prevailed in criticism since A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy, published in 1904. What annoyed Hawkes was the idea that Shakespeare dealt in truth which transcended history and that the characters in his plays represented "essential human nature". "I find that restrictive," he explains. "Because if there is some kind of essential human nature, it means that essential change is not possible and that is depressing."

Bradley's idea that Shakespeare presents "individuals with characters inside them which then develop", rather like characters in Victorian novels in fact, according to Hawkes, is a product of 19th-century capitalism with its emphasis - revived by Mrs Thatcher - on individualism rather than society. Hawkes can still remember the animosity his criticism first caused, when "people used to tell me that I had no right to think or say the things I did say".

The Hawkes revolution came to a head in 1985, with the publication of Alternative Shakespeares, edited by John Drakakis, and now retrospectively known - like monarchs - as Alternative Shakespeares I.

There is widespread recognition of the book's impact. It made a "huge difference", according to Philippa Berry, a feminist Shakespearean schol- ar, since before that time critics had paid "little heed to Marxist ideas". And Jonathan Bate, whizz-kid Shakespeare professor at Liverpool University, acknowledges that it "opened up the possibility of new approaches". One of the key tenets of the book was that critics should not have to abandon aspects of themselves in order to become a certain ideal type of reader. It stressed the importance of declaring the theoretical position from which one approached literature and included contributions from feminist and poststructuralist critics as well as Marxists.

But it is a measure of the book's success that these ideas no longer seem shocking. Ann Thompson, professor of English at Roehampton Institute and editor of the Arden Shakespeare, admits that "all young scholars need to be aware of literary theory if applying for jobs now", and that Hawkes's ideas are taken for granted. Most of the Hawkes-influenced critics, who thrive on resisting the establishment, now have chairs in universities, and Hawkes himself is on the board of Shakespeare Survey, the major British academic journal. About half the contributors to Alternative Shakespeares appear again in Alternative Shakespeares 2, with more articles about a feminist, queer or postcolonial Shakespeare. Professor Bate criticises the new book for being "locked into an 80s notion of alternative" and appearing self-regarding. It is full of "writing about what other people in the book have already said rather than saying anything new about Shakespeare", he says.

Hawkes and Drakakis resist the idea that they are the "new orthodoxy". Drakakis warns of the need to remain vigilant against those who only mouth the new ideas and who "assimilate theory in the manner of a consumer activity". And Hawkes, although he admits to a "slight feeling that we may have won", is uncomfortable about assuming establishment status. "I think", he considers after being pressed about the nature of the orthodoxy he is resisting, "that what happens now is that they disagree with you in a more civilised way". In the search for enemies, he is delighted by high-publicity spats. The details of the debate, conducted in the letters pages of the London Review of Books, with James Wood, former chief literary critic of The Guardian and possibly the sole surviving exponent of the Shakespeare-as-truth notion, are published at the end of his book, Meaning by Shakespeare. And he is both fascinated and annoyed by what he sees as the misrepresentation of himself in the Australian play Dead White Males, in which a Hawkes-type character, described in a denigrating way as a "postmodern critic", shoots Shakespeare on stage. These clashes confirm, for him, that there continues to be an "ideological battle to be fought over Shakespeare".

But even among the general public, who are supposedly "in the grip of 'Bradleism"', the terms, at least, of Hawkes's arguments have filtered through. At "Shakespeare's Birthplace" in Stratford, one Australian tourist, who had heard of Dead White Males, was sceptical about what he called the "museumisation" of Shakespeare in Stratford. And Nistar Evin, a GCSE student of Indian descent who had brought his whole family to Stratford to see what he was studying, knowingly asserted that Shakespeare's plays "are very important to the heritage of this country".

Certainly among academics, Hawkes's battle seems to be over, since everyone now agrees in principle with him. "People just aren't that polemical now," Professor Thompson says. One possible focus for the ideological war might have been the appointment of the new director of the Shakespeare Institute, after the present director, Stanley Wells, retires next year. The post carries with it the chairmanship of the International Shakespeare Conference as well as the direction of the only research institute for Shakespeare in Britain, and therefore allows the incumbent to set the seal upon Shakespeare studies both nationally and internationally. But controversy now seems unlikely. Rumours are running that the two main contenders for the post are the feminist critic Professor Thompson and Peter Holland, a Cambridge-based scholar who writes about Shakespearean theatrical performances across cultures. The work of both is recognisably post-Hawkesian, and says Thompson, "would satisfy traditional scholars and less traditional scholars alike".

Identifying the new critical movement, or what Alternative Shakespeares 2 should have included, is more difficult than choosing Wells's successor. "There is a real lacuna in Shakespeare criticism at the moment," Dr Berry observes. People are "looking around for the new discourse", but there is much "uncertainty". Some continue to refine the gender-based approach. Others fight shy of approaching the centrality of Shakespeare at all and study Renaissance texts which are marginal to the canon. One possible new direction is the burgeoning interest in textual criticism. At the big international Shakespeare convention in Los Angeles this year, there was a recognisable "return to an interest in language", according to Bate. Critics are beginning to study the importance of the variant texts of Shakespeare, and it is the debates about editing which produce, for Thompson, "some of the liveliest and most controversial sessions". There is, it seems, a general disillusionment with cultural materialism and new historicism. Rather than focusing on descriptions of 17th-century popular culture, which the plays or criticism about them have written out, Bate and Thompson are now more excited by the implications of the two versions of King Lear.

However, just when academics might be in danger of embracing each other too closely, a new battleground has emerged which Hawkes is "quite happy" about - the opening of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in Southwark. The theatre has been built near the site of the original Globe using Elizabethan techniques and materials, and the debate about its implications is becoming quite heated. Hawkes has already published his reservations about the project in the first issue of the quarterly Globe magazine. He is concerned about the fact that the theatre aims at "authenticity" and "accuracy" but that this will always be "limited" and will "obscure" the real historical conditions of the past. In fact, he gleefully points out, Shakespeare audiences had usually also watched the bear-baiting next door. "We have to accept that the audience which responded intelligently to Hamlet was also an audience which liked to see a blind and screaming Harry Hunks whipped until he bled." Alan Sinfield, professor of English at the University of Sussex and a contributor to Alternative Shakespeares 2, shares this view. The whole project of the Globe is "trying to make the audience more like an Elizabethan audience", he complained. "I am just tired of heritage."

But other academics, even apparently from the same camp, are in favour. Lisa Jardine, professor at Queen Mary and Westfield College and a great admirer of Hawkes, thinks it a "worthwhile enterprise" and served on the education committee of the Globe until other work commitments overwhelmed her. Bate admits that he is "quite excited" by the project, which will allow "a more flexible, less fixed form of dramatic characterisation". Traditional theatre architecture, with proscenium arch, results in realist theatre, he argues, but the different lighting and staging of the Globe could mean getting closer to the original method of representation. It all crucially depends upon Mark Rylance, the former RSC actor and now artistic director of the Globe company. Professor Jardine concedes that if the Globe "descended into pedantry and antiquarianism" she might change sides, but for now "there could never be heritage with Mark Rylance".

Certainly the opening show in the experimental prologue season did not seem nauseatingly reverential towards the past. The Two Gentlemen of Verona was performed in modern dress with the camp self irony and simultaneous enthusiasm of pantomime. The audience in the "groundlings" section heckled and hissed, and seemed to react quicker to the jokes than a conventional audience. But they were in no sense pseudo-Elizabethans. In the gallery, people worried about the logistical problems of allowing late-comers to their seats, while one bemused couple stood throughout the evening among the groundlings, forlornly clutching their seat cushions.

There are threats to the project. A large hospitality building is being erected beside the theatre, and companies have already bought debentures. By next year the already marked similarity to Wimbledon's centre court might be increased, with rows of empty but unbuyable seats, and the commercial appropriation of Shakespeare will provide a further source of amusement and study for Hawkes. But in the meantime, as long as Rylance directs and the saxophone buskers play jazzed-up madrigals outside, the exciting possibility of new Shakespearean experimentation and debate remains. "It is a wonderful collision between the old and the new," Jardine confesses. "I am going there on the last night with my mother."

Jennifer Wallace is director of studies in English, Peterhouse, Cambridge.