I've mentioned several times the excellent Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory: 1945-2000 (2004), edited by Russ McDonald, as recently as Monday, in fact, and it came to mind again as I was looking through Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) for yesterday's post. Yesterday, I quoted Bloom in regard to the critical position appropriate to working with Shakespeare. Today, I'll quote his thoughts on some of the various critical schools that have sprung up over the last fifty years of Shakespeare study:

"Explaining Shakespeare is an infinite exercise, you will become exhausted long before the plays are emptied out. Allegorizing or ironizing Shakespeare by privileging cultural anthropology or theatrical history or religion or psychoanalysis or politics or Foucault or Marx or feminism works only in limited ways. You are likely, if you are shrewd, to achieve Shakespearean insights into your favorite hobbyhorse, but you are rather less likely to achieve Freudian or Marxist or feminist insight into Shakespeare. His universality will defeat you, his plays know more than you do, and your knowingness consequently will be in danger of dwindling into ignorance."

Not subtle, I'll grant you, but not wrong.