New approaches to Shakespeare

So far in this book we have been looking at how you can construct your own reading of a Shakespeare play: how, by working with a set of simple ideas centring on the notions of order and disorder, it is possible to make sense quickly of both the overall significance of a play and also the details that give substance to its particular themes and ideas. At the heart of the method lies the strategy of moving from a broad sense of the play to looking closely at a short extract which is then interpreted in the light of your broad ideas. The logic of this method is that we move from a very general idea of what the play is about towards a more complex view built on the evidence of a sequence of extracts. That is worth stressing. Your view of a play should change as you work on it. Indeed, your final view of a text may well be very different from that with which you started.