“Historicizing, politicizing, even feminizing Shakespeare—are all redundant operations: Shakespeare always was there before us. He emancipated no one (that we know of) from the power structures of his own day, and cannot liberate us from any societal enclosures in our current squalor. If you query Shakespeare for ultimates, you emerge with nothing, and you are in danger of pragmatically equating him with his own superb nihilists.”