The idea of communism in Shakespeare

[Excerpt] I might have entitled this chapter ‘Shakespeare and the idea of harmony’ or perhaps ‘Shakespeare and order’ – both of which titles would have been less immediately alarming. They might have conveyed my meaning more exactly, perhaps. But I wanted to get in the suggestion of ‘communism’ so as not to lose sight of the contemporary salience of the set of ideas I want to discuss. Communism is now pretty much unthinkable, unsayable, at least in respectable public speech. So the concepts presented in these pages may have only historical interest. Still, I think they are important, and especially now, in the no-longer quite- early years of the twenty-first century, when ‘competition’ is the default framework for understanding the economy. It is perhaps only in disregarded fields such as academic literary criticism that the social ideal might resurface – doing so precisely because it is deemed irrelevant to the larger culture; for, politically speaking, even the moderate state welfarism of the postwar period, as Tony Judt has shown, is virtually extinct.