1. Othello is quoted from the New Arden edition, ed. M. R. Ridley (London: Methuen, 1962). An earlier version of parts of this paper, entitled "Othello and the Politics of Character," was published in Manuel Barbeito, ed., In Mortal Shakespeare: Radical Readings (Santiago: Univ. de Santiago de Compostela, 1989).

2. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 245; and also pp. 234-39, and Greenblatt, "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture," in Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds., Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), p. 218. On stories in Othello, see further Jonathan Goldberg, "Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power," in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 131-32.

3. Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester Univ. Press, 1989), p. 48. See also Doris Adler, "The Rhetoric of Black and White in Othello, " Shakespeare Quarterly 25 (1974): 248-57.

4. Louis Althusser, "Ideological State Apparatuses," in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 160-65.

5. Peter Stallybrass, "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, eds., Rewriting the Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 139. Greenblatt makes a comparable point about Jews in Marlowe's Jew of Malta, though in Othello he stresses Iago's "ceaseless narrative invention": see Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 208, 235. On Blacks in Shakespearean England, see Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, pp. 42-52; Ruth Cowhig, "Blacks in English Renaissance Drama and the Role of Shakespeare's Othello, '' in David Dabydeen, ed., The Black Presence in English Literature (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1985).

6. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy , pp. 123-28. For further elaboration of the theory presented here, see Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell; Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989), ch. 3.

7. Colin Sumner, Reading Ideologies (London and New York: Academic Press, 1979), p. 288.

8. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 69-71, 77-78. Giddens's development of langue and parole is anticipated in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 380.

9. Stephen Orgel, "Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?" South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 7-29, pp. 8-10. Jonathan Goldberg writes of the Duke's scripting in Measure For Measure in his James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 230-39. See also Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 107-10.

10. On attitudes to Turks, see Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (New York: St Martin's Press, 1986), pp. 142-49. The later part of Othello's career, in fact, has been devoted entirely to state violence—as Martin Orkin has suggested, he is sent to Cyprus to secure it for the colonial power: see Orkin, Shakespeare against Apartheid (Craighall, South Africa: Ad. Donker, 1987), pp. 88-96.

11. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965), p. 61. See further Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy , pp. 139-42; Pierre Bourdieu, "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction," in Richard Brown, ed., Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change (London: Tavistock, 1973).

12. See Lynda E. Boose, "The Family in Shakespearean Studies; or—Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or—the Politics of Politics," Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987): 707-42; Carol Thomas Neely, "Constructing the Subject: Feminist Practice and the New Renaissance Discourses," English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 5-18.

13. Kathleen McLuskie, "The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare," in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), p. 97. For a reply to her critics by Kathleen McLuskie, see her Renaissance Dramatists (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 224-29; and for further comment, Jonathan Dollimore, "Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism, Feminism and Marxist Humanism," New Literary History 21 (1990): 471-93.

14. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, eds., The Woman's Part (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 5.

15. McLuskie, "Patriarchal Bard," p. 92.

16. Boose, "Family in Shakespearean Studies," pp. 734, 726, 724. See also Ann Thompson, "'The warrant of womanhood': Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism," in Graham Holderness, ed., The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1988); Judith Newton, "History as

Usual?: Feminism and the New Historicism," Cultural Critique 9 (1988): 87-121.

17. Richard Ohmann, English in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), p. 313. See V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language , trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York and London: Seminar Press, 1973), pp. 17-24, 83-98.

18. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 324.

19. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 6. See Celia Kitzinger, The Social Construction of Lesbianism (London: Sage, 1987). Diana Fuss asks: "Is politics based on identity, or is identity based on politics?" ( Essentially Speaking [London: Routledge, 1989], p. 100, and see ch. 6).

20. Neely, "Constructing the Subject," p. 7.

21. J. Hillis Miller, "Presidential Address, 1986: The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base," PMLA 102 (1987): 281-91, pp. 290-91. Cf., e.g., Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," New Left Review 82 (1973): 3-16; reprinted in Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980; New York: Schocken Books, 1981). James Holstun, "Ranting at the New Historicism," English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 189-225, makes more effort than most to address European/Marxist work.)

22. Peter Nicholls, "State of the Art: Old Problems and the New Historicism," Journal of American Studies 23 (1989): 423-34, pp. 428, 429.

23. Don E. Wayne, "New Historicism," in Malcolm Kelsall, Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, and John Peck, eds., Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 795. I am grateful to Professor Wayne for showing this essay to me in typescript. Further on this topic, see Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, "Introduction," Don E. Wayne, "Power, Politics and the Shakespearean Text: Recent Criticism in England and the United States," and Walter Cohen, "Political Criticism of Shakespeare," all in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, eds., Shakespeare Reproduced (London: Methuen, 1987); Louis Montrose, ''Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture," in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 20-24; Alan Liu, "The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism," English Literary History 56 (1989): 721-77.

24. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning , pp. 120, 209-14. For further instantiation, see pp. 173-74.

25. Carolyn Porter, "Are We Being Historical Yet?" South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (1988): 743-86; see also Porter, "History and Literature: 'After the New Criticism,'" New Literary History 21 (1990): 253-72.

26. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Course: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 164-66.

27. Shakespeare, Macbeth , ed. Kenneth Muir, 9th ed. (London: Methuen, 1962), 1.4.12-13. See further chapter 5.

28. William Shakespeare, King Henry V , ed. J. H. Walter (London: Methuen, 1954), act 5, Chorus, 29-35. See further chapter 6.

29. Raymond Williams, Culture (Glasgow: Fontana, 1981), p. 201.

30. Porter, "Are We Being Historical Yet?" p. 774. For important recent discussions of the scope for movement in the early modern state, see Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds., Conflict in Early Stuart England (London: Longmans, 1989), esp. Johann Sommerville, "Ideology, Property and the Constitution."

31. I am not happy that race and sexuality tend to feature in distinct parts of this chapter; in this respect, my wish to clarify certain theoretical arguments has produced some simplification. Of course, race and sexuality are intertwined, in Othello as elsewhere. See Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, pp. 48-62; Karen Newman, "'And wash the Ethiop white': Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello, " in Howard and O'Connor, eds., Shakespeare Reproduced; Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), part 4.

32. I set out this argument in Alan Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England, 1560-1660 (London: Croom Helm, 1983), ch. 4. See also Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1976); Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), pp. 53-56, 107-18; Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1985), ch. 7; Dympna Callaghan, Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1989), ch. 2 et passim; McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists, pp. 31-39, 50-55 et passim.

33. Certain Sermons or Homilies (London: Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge, 1899), p. 534.

34. Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1977), p. 501.

35. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: Dent, 1932), 3:52-53.

36. Certain Sermons, p. 589.

37. Henry Smith, Works, with a memoir by Thomas Fuller (Edinburgh, 1886), 1: 32, 19.

38. Gerrard Winstanley, Works, ed. G. H. Sabine (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1941), p. 599.

39. William Perkins, Christian Economy (1609), in The Work of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), pp. 418-19.

40. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), p. 137. See also ibid., pp. 151-59, 178-91, 195-302; Charles and Katherine George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 257-94; Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Panther, 1969), pp. 429-67; Louis Adrian Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Representing the English Renaissance (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 37-40; Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), ch. 3; Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 17-30, 147-54; Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (London: Macmillan, 1988, ch. 3.

41. Callaghan, Woman and Gender, p. 21; also pp. 19-22, 101-5. On women's scope for negotiation, see also Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 1-10.

42. Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies,'" p. 37. For the thought that the men in Othello are preoccupied with their masculinity but ineffectual, see Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 119-22.

43. John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts, "Subcultures, Cultures and Class," in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance through Rituals (London: Hutchinson; Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1976), p. 12. The final phrase is quoted from E. P. Thompson's essay "The Peculiarities of the English."

44. Giddens, Central Problems, p. 6. See further Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 108-27; Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text 1 (1979): 144-48; Colin Gordon, "Afterword," in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (Brighton: Harvester, 1980).

45. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 , trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1980), pp. 95-96. Also, as Jonathan Culler has remarked, Foucault's exposure of the ubiquity of regulatory practices may itself be experienced as liberatory: Culler, Framing the Sign (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 66-67.

46. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 101. See Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, "Culture and Textuality: Debating Cultural Materialism," Textual Practice 4, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 91-100, p. 95; and Jonathan Dollimore, "Sexuality, Subjectivity and Transgression: The Jacobean Connection," Renaissance Drama , n.s., 17 (1986): 53-82.

47. Jonathan Goldberg, "Speculations: Macbeth and Source," in Howard and O'Connor, Shakespeare Reproduced , pp. 244, 247. See also Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), esp. pp. 41-55.

48. Williams, Culture, pp. 94, 110; Keith Thomas, "The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England," in Gerd Baumann, ed., The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 116, 118.

49. Dollimore, "Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism, Feminism and Marxist Humanism," p. 482. See also Holstun, "Ranting at the New Historicism."

50. Dollimore and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare, p. 13; discussed in Dollimore and Sinfield, "Culture and Textuality." See also Alan Liu's argument that we need to consider not only subjects and representation, but action: Liu, "Power of Formalism," pp. 734-35.

51. Wayne, "New Historicism," in Kelsall, Coyle, Garside, and Peck, eds., Encyclopedia, pp. 801-2. See also Culler, Framing, p. 37; Porter, "History and Literature," pp. 253-56.

52. "The Political Function of the Intellectual," trans. Colin Gordon, Radical Philosophy 17 (1977): 12-15, p. 14; see Eve Tavor Bannet, Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 170-83.

53. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977) p. 209.

Epigraphs: David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (New York: New American Library, 1989), p. 63; note Hwang's locution "supposed to act." Pope, Moral Essays 2.1-2.