Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. 3rd Edition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. cii + 312 pp.

Since its original publication in 1984, Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy has sustained its significance as a seminal critical text in both cultural materialism and Renaissance drama. It is a book that challenges the postEnlightenment "humanist" criticism of Renaissance texts, arguing that humanist essentialism de-historicizes those texts by viewing tragedy, in particular, as a genre that either transcends the structures of power and the historical moment or as a device of ideological affirmation. Dollimore argues instead that essentialism is itself an historical construct, and early modern tragedy in fact neither validates nor transcends the dominant ideologies of early modern England but rather "interrogates ideology from within, seizing on and exposing its contradictions and inconsistencies and offering alternative ways of understanding social and political process" (8).

In Part 1, "Radical Drama: Its Contexts and Emergence," Dollimore systemically sets forth the book's central argument, and it is in this first section that perhaps the most valuable observations are made. Dollimore first demonstrates that literary criticism-particularly essentialist humanism-has not adequately accounted for the Renaissance's own concern for relativism and ideological uncertainty. Dollimore cites numerous examples of Renaissance thinkers-Hobbes, Machiavelli, Montaigne, among others-who recognized that "epistemological and ethical truth was . . . relative to custom and social practice" (11). As a result of such a recognition, these thinkers had to examine "ideological considerations" (11) in a manner not unlike contemporary theorists. Dollimore compares, with numerous examples, the nature of "custom" in Althusser and...