William Shakespeare

Terry Eagleton, a prominent Marxist literary critic, presents this study as an exercise in "political semiotics," a method that locates history within the language of Shakespeare's texts rather than treating the plays as conventional historical documents. Organized thematically rather than chronologically, the book examines Shakespeare's major plays through a sustained argument about the interrelations of language, desire, law, money, and the body. Eagleton writes with characteristic wit, noting that Shakespeare seems so familiar with the ideas of thinkers like Hegel, Marx, and Freud that the plays anticipate the concerns of contemporary critical theory.

The opening chapter, "Language," identifies a fundamental contradiction in Shakespeare's work. A stable system of signs, in which each word securely corresponds to its meaning, is integral to any well-ordered political state, yet Shakespeare's extravagant punning, riddling, and metaphor-making constantly threaten to destabilize those meanings. His political commitment to social order is at odds with the restless language in which that commitment is expressed.

Eagleton's reading of Macbeth exemplifies this tension. He provocatively contends that the three witches are the play's true heroines: exiles from a violent social order, they expose reverence for hierarchy as self-deception. Their riddling speech infiltrates Macbeth's identity, and Eagleton calls them the play's "unconscious" (2), a discourse in which meaning falters and binary oppositions dissolve. The witches inhabit cyclical time and represent a creative, communal dissolution of rigid categories, while the Macbeths pursue a linear, historically driven ambition that consumes itself. When language overwhelms the body, Macbeth becomes a "bundle of broken signifiers" (7), or words severed from stable meanings, and Lady Macbeth disintegrates into fragments of hallucinated speech. The play's central problem is how to reintegrate consciousness within the body's limits without suppressing what is productive about individual energy.

The chapter continues with Richard II, where a "poet king" (10) trusts entirely to the power of language, translating political realities into decorative verbal fictions while engaging in ruthless opportunism. When his title and rhetoric are stripped away by his rival nobleman Bolingbroke, Richard's identity comes apart. John of Gaunt, the dying nobleman whose speeches anchor language in moral authority, counters the king's debasement of verbal currency. In Henry IV, Falstaff subverts social order from two opposed directions: His grossly material body refuses social decorum, while his fantastical language resists all truth. Both aspects belong to the carnivalesque, or tradition of comic social inversion and bodily license, yet they pull in opposite directions. Eagleton draws a surprising parallel with Hotspur, Falstaff's martial foil, noting that both oppose body to words, though Hotspur desires a language adequate to action while Falstaff flourishes in the gap between them.

Chapter 2, "Desire," argues that sexual desire is the place where language and the body most obviously intersect. Desire in Shakespeare is physical, yet even more a matter of discourse. Characters in love are simultaneously at their most "real" and "unreal," since to say "I love you" is always at some level a quotation. Marriage is Shakespeare's proposed solution to the anarchic force of desire, a solution Eagleton finds so implausible he doubts Shakespeare believed in it. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the interchangeability of the four lovers suggests all relationships are potentially reversible, and without magical intervention the play's problems would remain unsolved. Puck, the mischievous fairy servant, functions as a figure of unconscious desire, while Bottom, the comically literal craftsman, is Puck's polar opposite. The two represent what Eagleton, borrowing from the philosopher Theodor Adorno, calls "the torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up" (25). In Twelfth Night, the Clown Feste, who calls himself a "corrupter of words" (28), links verbal play, sexual promiscuity, and money's self-generating power in a single logical chain.

Chapter 3, "Law," establishes a structural parallel between language and law: Both must be general and impartial yet exist only in particular human contexts requiring creative interpretation. Eagleton's reading of The Merchant of Venice contends that Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, respects the spirit of the law, while Portia, a noblewoman who poses as a lawyer to argue against him, does not. Portia's reading of the bond is technically defensible but too literal, ignoring the accepted meanings surrounding any legal text. Eagleton speculates that Shylock may never have expected to win, instead defying the court to expose the hollowness of Christian justice. He interprets Shylock's insistence on a pound of flesh from Antonio, the merchant of the play's title, as a symbolic claim to shared humanity in the context of anti-Semitic persecution. The suitor Bassanio's elevation of love over riches, in the act of purchasing a wealthy woman, exemplifies the bourgeois habit of fetishizing a realm supposedly free of commercial transactions. In Measure for Measure, the deputy Angelo's reversal from repressive legalist to rampant lecher dramatizes the closeness of anarchy and authoritarianism. The play shows law breeding desire: Angelo's lust for Isabella, the sister of the condemned Claudio, is fueled by her chaste untouchability. Eagleton finds the resolution through marriage inadequate, since marriage is part of the very problem it is supposed to solve. Troilus and Cressida, set during the Trojan War, stages a debate between essentialist and existentialist theories of value, with the Trojan prince Hector arguing that value dwells partly in the object itself, while Troilus insists things are worth only what they are valued at. Both positions prove unstable.

Chapter 4, "'Nothing,'" opens by noting that in Elizabethan English "nothing" could refer to the female genitals. Eagleton reads Othello through sexual jealousy as a crisis of interpretation: Othello is simultaneously too literal, credulously accepting the villain Iago's lies, and too fanciful, fabricating an imaginary sub-text. He argues that sexual desire is itself a form of jealousy, since to desire someone is to see them as an other one lacks. Hamlet is read from the standpoint of "nothing" itself. Hamlet's negativity takes the form of melancholia, linked to the loss of his mother, who has revealed herself capable of desire for another man. He spends the play eluding social and sexual positions, protecting an inner privacy that turns out to be empty. Eagleton calls him a "radically transitional figure" (74), strung between a traditional social order and a future epoch of bourgeois individualism. Coriolanus, by contrast, is ruthlessly self-identical, a blank tautology who confers value on himself in disregard of social opinion.

Chapter 5, "Value," reads the opening of King Lear as a scene of severe linguistic inflation. Goneril and Regan, Lear's elder daughters, inflate love beyond all measure, canceling it out. The murmured "Nothing" of Cordelia, Lear's youngest daughter, is the only sound currency: When meaning has been inflated beyond measure, only a drastic reduction can restabilize the verbal coinage. The play explores the paradox that it is natural for humans to transcend their limits, yet this creative self-exceeding is also the source of destructiveness. Cordelia's forgiveness represents a gratuitous excess of justice's strict requirements, a creative nothing out of which something may come. The chapter also treats Timon of Athens as a study of aristocratic generosity that is itself a form of egotism, and reads Antony and Cleopatra as the traditional social order's flamboyant self-immolation, a gamble that overflowing the measure might achieve transcendence.

The final chapter, "Nature," argues that Shakespeare deconstructs the opposition between Nature and culture. In The Winter's Tale, King Polixenes argues to the shepherdess Perdita that Nature itself produces the means of its own transformation. Eagleton identifies this as Shakespeare's attempt at resolution, though it depends on a logical slide in the meaning of "Nature." The Tempest offers a final attempt to harmonize body and language through Ariel, a spirit symbolizing the creative word in action for the magician Prospero, and Caliban, a figure of pure body who learns language only to curse. Yet the play cannot address the contradiction that its restoration of social order is set in the context of colonialism, signaling the victory of the mercantile bourgeoisie it opposes.

The Conclusion identifies Shakespeare's utopian solution, an organic unity of body and language, as structurally unattainable. The body can never be fully present in discourse because the sign necessarily distances itself from its referent, the thing it points to. Eagleton reads the conflict of body and language as an allegory of class struggle between feudalism and capitalism, though the terms can be partly reversed. Shakespeare's imagined reconciliation proved historically illusory: Capitalism violently uprooted feudalism rather than merging with it. The last plays achieve resolution only through factitious magic, an ideology of Nature, and the desexualization of women. Eagleton concludes by grounding these concerns in material history: Prices in England rose fivefold between 1530 and 1640, and Shakespeare's era was marked by intense economic anxiety, the real conditions endured by his contemporaries while his characters philosophized, spent, and feasted.