State Of The Theory

This is Episode 14 of the State of the Theory Podcast. Politics. Power. Popular Culture. And other stuff, probably. In this series, we’re like super nerdy philosophical DJs: mashing up Serious Academic Questions with the most topical news and trends in pop culture. Each week, we’ll tackle a new topic and collide it with ‘critical theory’ (we’re pretty loose with our definitions, though, so expect the unexpected). Our aim is to destroy the stuff we know, explore the stuff we don’t and unsettle everything we think we know about the world. We take the obvious, the commonsensical, the certain, and then we rip it all to shreds. We are your theory doctors and we are always on call. In this episode, we look at the politics of commemoration of Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary. We look at the ways in which Shakespeare has been used to represent British nationhood, and a universal humanism at the same time. We explore the political implications of this, in terms of class, nationhood and Empire. The text we refer to i