Exhibition: Shakespeare at the OU

In the next clip (Clip 19) Kiernan Ryan seeks to differentiate between two similar schools of criticism, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, and this leads to interesting speculation on why there is a common tendency to assume that Shakespeare in his writings reflected the establishment values of the society of his time rather than questioning or challenging them – whereas the reverse is the common assumption regarding, say, Dickens’s novels set in Victorian England.

View Clip 19