Dr Christopher Marlow: 'systems of control?: Shakespeare, cultural materialism and agency'

In this paper I address a recent debate about the role of human agency in cultural materialism. Cultural materialists, above all else, analyse texts from a materialist rather than an idealist perspective, and over the last thirty years this has proven transformative for Shakespeare studies. Unfortunately the approach has also been regularly misunderstood, and in looking at why that might have been the case I want to draw out some aspects of what the approach has inherited from Marxism. I argue that cultural materialism is far more sceptical about the so-called ‘systems of control’ associated with thinkers such as Althusser and Foucault than has often been thought.