Speaking to readers in a voice that is adventurous rather than authoritative, innovative rather than institutional and speculative rather than orthodox, Linda Charnes' provocative study of Shakespeare's legacy in contemporary American and British politics explores the following themes: namesake princes and presidents stolen thrones and elections plutocrats and insurgents campaign trails and war-mongering waning monarchy and imperilled democracy revengers, early modern and postmodern. Linked by focused readings of Hamlet and the Henriad, the essays follow Shakespeare's two most famous royal sons, the Princes Hamlet and Hal, as they haunt contemporary political psychology in the early years of a new millennium, and especially in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Between devolution in Britain and the new 'doctrine' of pre-emptive strike in the United States, our contemporary Hamlets and Hals epitomize a debate - as fraught now as in Shakespeare' day - about the cost of spin-doctoring legacies. In exploring how current political culture inherits Shakespeare, Hamlet's Heirs challenges scholarly assumptions about historical periodicity, modernity and the uses of Shakespeare in present day contexts.

Namesake princes and presidents; stolen thrones and elections; plutocrats and insurgents; campaign trails and war-mongering; waning monarchy and imperilled democracy; and revengers, early modern and postmodern: these themes drive this provocative study of Shakespeare's legacy in contemporary American and British politics.
Linked by focused readings o"f Hamlet and the Henriad, "the essays follow Shakespeare's two most famous royal sons, the Princes Hamlet and Hal, as they haunt contemporary political psychology in the early years of a new millennium, and especially in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Between devolution in Britain and the new "doctrine" of pre-emptive strike in the United States, our contemporary Hamlets and Hals epitomize a debate-as fraught now as in Shakespeare's day-about the cost of spin-doctoring legacies. In exploring how current political culture inherits Shakespeare, Hamlet's Heirs challenges scholarly assumptions about historical periodicity, modernity, and the uses of Shakespeare in present-day contexts.
Speaking to readers in a voice that is adventurous rather than authoritative, innovative rather than institutional, and speculative rather than orthodox, Charnes reveals that when it comes to legacy we are all, in one way or another, Hamlet's heirs.

Richard III, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra--these were figures of intense signification long before Shakespeare took up the task of giving them new life on the stage. And when he did, Linda Charnes argues, he used these legendary figures to explore a new kind of fame--notorious identity--an infamy based not on the moral and ethical "use value" of legend but on a commodification of identity itself: one that must be understood in the context of early modern England's emergent capitalism and its conditions of economic, textual, theatrical, and cultural reproduction. Ranging across cultural materialism, new historicism, feminist psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, deconstruction, and theories of postmodernity, the author practices a "theory without organs"--which she provocatively calls a constructive "New Hystericism"--retheorizing the discourses of reigning methodologies as much as those in Shakespeare's plays.