Marxist Shakespeares

In one account of his intellectual trajectory as a member of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall talks of his own personal and the group’s collective struggle, over a number of years, with Marxism (Hall 1992). He came to Marxism, he insists, unwillingly.
Like many of his generation, he early on experienced the profound revulsion from Soviet state communism occasioned among other things by the movement of Soviet tanks into Budapest in 1956. If Marxism meant Soviet totalitarianism, he wanted nothing to do with it. Nor did Marxism easily satisfy Hall’s requirements for a subtle and comprehensive mode of cultural analysis.