'Thirty year ago': the complex legacy of Political Shakespeare

This paper was delivered in the plenary session of the Shakespeare Association of America’s annual meeting in St Louis, April 2014, alongside papers from Ania Loomba and Jonathan Dollimore. The purpose of the panel was to commemorate and celebrate two important critical texts whose anniversaries fell at that time: Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy, published in 1984, and Political Shakespeare (1985), edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, which went into its second edition in 1994. This paper discusses the impact and influence of Political Shakespeare, to which I was a contributor.