Radical Tragedy is a landmark study of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and a classic of cultural materialist thought. The reissued third edition features a candid and inspiring new Preface by the author in which he explains his reasons for excluding Othello from his original discussion. The main text has also now been corrected.

Why is homosexuality socially marginal yet symbolically central? Why, in other words, is it so strangely integral to the very societies which obsessively denounce it, and why is it history - history rather than human nature - which has produced this paradoxical position? These are just some of the questions explored in this wide-ranging study of sexual dissidence which returns to the early modern period in order to focus, question, and develop issues of postmodernity. In the process it brilliantly links writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Gide, Wilde, and Genet, and cultural critics as...