This is a bold and original reinterpretation of almost all ofShakespeare's major plays, in the light of the Marxist, feministand semiotic ideas of our own time. Through a set of tenaciouslydetailed readings, the book illuminates a number of persistentproblems or conflicts in Shakespearean drama - in particular acontradiction between words and things, body and language, which isalso explored in terms of law, sexuality and Nature. Language and desire, Terry Eagleton argues, are seen byShakespeare as a kind of 'surplus' over and above the body, stableand social roles and a fixed human nature. But the attitude of theplays to such a 'surplus' is profoundly ambivalent; if they admireit as the very source of human creativity, they also fear itsanarchic, trangressive force. Underlying such ambiguities, the bookconvincingly shows, is a deeper ideological struggle, betweenfeudalist traditionalism on the one hand, and the emergence of newforms of bourgeois individualism on the other. This book revelshow, in the light of our own contemporary theories of language,sexuality and society, we can understand the issues present inShakespeare's drama which previously have remained obscure.