Over the last two decades, Shakespeare studies have received the attention of most contemporary theoretical orthodoxies and heterodoxies. Read through a baffling range of analytic and political vectors-marxist, cultural materialist, feminist, new historicist, postcolonial, poststructuralist- ‘Shakespeare’ has emerged as the favoured site for the practice of literary theory. Despite charges of textual imperialism, the history of this contentious canon, and its transmission, carries the culturally variegated and dissenting voices of heterogeneous readers.

Drawing upon recent work by scholars based in the Indian and Anglo-American academy, this anthology offers a glimpse of the critical variety arising from Shakespearean texts. While the essays included here cover several competing methodologies and ideological perspectives, the volume showcases some new and significant feminist and ‘queer’ reevaluations of Shakespeare’s plays and poems.

Leela Gandhi studied English at Delhi University and then at Oxford University, where she completed in M.Phil on Renaissance Drama: 1560-1640, and a D.Phil which examined the interface between changing attitudes to mortality in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England and the representation of death on the Shakespearean stage. She now researches and writes in the fields of Renaissance Literature and Postcolonial Theory, and teaches both areas at the School of English, La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her recent publications include Postcolonial Theory (1998) and a co-edited journal Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy. Her book of poems, Measures of Home (Ravi Dayal) will be published later this year.