Another book on Shakespeare? That is, indeed, one of the questions this book is about. In the essays collected here I will explore the ways in which Shakespeare has come to haunt our culture, the ways in which the plays are central not only to English Studies but also to recent, more subversive, theoretical approaches to literature -- new historicism, deconstruction, feminism, and psychoanalysis.
     Readers will note the recurrence in these pages of many familiar ghosts of poststructuralism -- Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Marx, de Man, and Nietzsche -- alongside Thomas More, Samuel Johnson, A.C. Bradley, and Superman comic books. Why the emphasis upon the canonical figures of postmodernism and poststructuralism? Because, once again, what interests me is the uncanny extent to which these writers are themselves haunted by Shakespeare, the way in which Shakespearean texts -- and especially the most canonical texts of Shakespearean tragedy -- have mined themselves into the theoretical speculations that have dominated our present discourses, whether in literature, history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, or politics.   (xiii)

     Why do we still maintain the centrality of Shakespeare? Why in a time of canon expansion and critique of canonical literature does Shakespeare not only remain unchallenged, but in fact emerge newly canonized, as the proliferation of new critical anthologies -- Alternative Shakespeares, Political Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory -- attests? Why does Harold Bloom exempt Shakespeare from the anxiety of influence, Geoffrey Hartman coedit with Patricia Parker an anthology of Shakespeare criticism, J. Hillis Miller bolster his argument about narrative theory with a reference to Troilus and Cressida? Why does Terry Eagleton, who usually writes metacriticism, devote a book to William Shakespeare? Why does Elaine Showalter, who usually writes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminist topics, select Ophelia as the focus of a recent study? Why with the current renaissance in Renaissance studies, is Shakespeare still the touchstone for new historicists, feminists, deconstructors? Why, in other words, do those who criticize canonical authority so often turn to Shakespeare to ratify the authority of their critique?
     If anything is clear, it is that the Ghost is not -- or not merely -- Shakespeare père or Shakespeare fils, the son of John Shakespeare or the father of Hamnet -- but rather "Shakespeare" itself. The ambiguous and ambivalent pronoun of Act 1 is appropriately used here, because Shakespeare is a concept -- and a construct -- rather than an author. We thus hear of the Shakespeare establishment, and of "Shakespeare" as a corpus of plays -- a corpus "Incorpsed" in innumerable authoritative editions, yet one that breaks the bounds -- the margins -- set to contain it, stalking the battlements of theory:

                                                       tell
Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd,
Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again.

The Ghost is Shakespeare. He is the one who comes as a revenant. belatedly instated, regarded as originally authoritative, rather than retrospectively and retroactively canonized, and deriving increased authority from this very instatement of authority backward, over time. "The ghost, le re-venant, the survivor, appears only as a means of figure or fiction, but its appearance is not nothing, nor is it a mere semblance." This "presence without present of a present which, coming back, only haunts" haunts Freud, haunts Nietzsche, haunts Lacan, haunts postmodern England and postmodern America. The Ghost's command, his word, is "Remember me!" and we have done so, to the letter, avant la lettre, moving our remembrance further and further back until it becomes an originary remembrance, a remembrance of remembrance itself. "Remember me!" cries the Ghost, and Shakespeare is for us the superego of literature, that which calls us back to ourselves, to an imposed, undecidable, but self-chosen attribution of paternity. "Remember me!" The canon has been fixed against self-slaughter.
     "A little more than kin and less than kind." Hamlet's bitter phrase inflects not only the problem of a ghostly genre, the unwriting and rewriting of revenge tragedy, but also the continuous attempt to render Shakespeare both kind and kin, of our time, our contemporary, always already postmodern, decentered. "Yet his modernity too, like Nietzsche's, is a forgetting or a suppression of anteriority." This is de Man on Baudelaire. But it could be said of Hamlet -- and of Shakespeare. This Baudelairization is not Bowdlerization, but transference, con-texting. We know that Shakespeare played the part of the Ghost in Hamlet. What could not be foreseen, except through anamorphic reading, was that he would become that Ghost. "Remember me!" the Ghost cries. "Do not forget." And, indeed, we do not yet seem quite able to give up that ghost.   (175-176)