Shakespeare in Hindsight

We know William Shakespeare matters but we cannot pinpoint, precisely, why he matters. Lacking reasons why, we do our best to involve him in others, or involve others in him. He has been branded many times overas Catholic, Protestant, Materialist, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Feminist, Postcolonial, Popular, Cultural, and, even, Popular-Cultural. In many ways, Shakespeare is overwrought. Why one more `approach to Shakespeare? One reason is because whatever these approaches say about tragedy in particular, none of them help us to feel tragedy. Or, rather, they subordinate tragedy to something elseto considerations of, say, class, race, or gender. What these approaches manage to do is explain tragedy away. What this book does is to help us feel tragedy first and foremosthence to perceive it better. The aim of Amir Khans counterfactual criticism of Shakespeares tragedies, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, A Winters Tale and Othello, then, is precisely to reanimate the tragic effect, long since lost in some deluge of explanation.