About the Author:
Richard Levin is Professor of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received all his degrees at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama, which won the Explicator Award, and New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama.

This book collects a number of Richard Levin's essays, beginning with his well-known PMLA article of 1988 on "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy" and continuing through the 1990s, that examine and evaluate some of the most important aspects of the new approaches to the interpretation of the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries--principally the New Historicism, feminism, and several revisionist versions of Marxism and Freudianism. These approaches, which rose to prominence with the decline of formalism in the early 1980s, have come to dominate academic criticism in this field (and in most other fields as well) over the last two decades and have hardened into a kind of orthodoxy. It is the purpose of the essays in this book to raise serious questions about the assumptions and procedures of these approaches and therefore about their present dominant status on the critical scene.