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role in the introduction to Clare Asquith’s Shakespeare and the Resistance. She argues that The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis are both keys to understanding Shakespeare’s politics. But there are scholars who think that such speculation, a pillar of the New Historicism movement that Greenblatt championed (he even coined the term in the early 1980s), is wrongheaded. The New Historicists want to break down the idea of Shakespeare as some independent genius different from everybody around him, seeking to place him in his proper context. But this approach has hit stormy waters among a smaller sector of scholars who want to use it to prove things about Shakespeare himself, particularly that he was a Catholic. SHAKESPEARE AND THE RESISTANCE by Clare AsquithPublic Affairs, 288 pp., $18.99 Asquith published an article in the Times Literary Supplement in 2001 arguing that Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle contains evidence of his religious feeling. She also published a book, Shadowplay, in 2005, which furthered her work on the “religious and political subtext underlying Shakespeare’s work.” It was “vehemently rejected by Shakespeare scholars, who portrayed it as merely another attempt to prove that he was a Catholic,” she writes in her newest book. Asquith was tarred as one of the many speculators who wanted to show that Shakespeare was “an Italian, a covert homosexual, a Jesuit, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford ... a loyalist, a dissident, a Tudor apologist, an atheist, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Puritan, an elitist, a populist, a proto-Marxist, and the love-child of Elizabeth I.” So, Asquith comes to this new book with a lot of personal baggage. But she plows ahead, tackling not our own political moment, as Greenblatt does in code, but specifically the Essex Rebellion of 1601. Asquith’s reading of The Rape of Lucrece essentially proposes the poem as a political allegory, with Lucrece the raped but stoical suicide as a figure for an England ravaged by the Reformation. Tarquin’s attack on Lucrece is a perfect “parallel to the royal takeover of the English church,” she writes, while Cardinal Wolsey’s liquidization of monasteries for cash represents an ideal example of revenue generated “ex rapinis,” by seizure. The poem represents a kind of political catharsis, Asquith argues, an “exhilarating” experience for Elizabethan readers “as they saw their own situation portrayed on stage, and, often, not merely portrayed but closely analysed and resolved.” Her argument is bolstered by the dedication of The Rape of Lucrece and also Venus and Adonis to the Earl of Southampton, a patron figure to Shakespeare and supporter of the Essex Rebellion. In these poems she finds a portrait of Southampton that doesn’t tally with the traditional stereotype of the patron as an effeminate, ineffectual youth engaged in a love affair with Shakespeare. Instead, she finds in Shakespeare’s narrative poems an allegory of the “opponents of the late Elizabethan regime.” They are the enemies of tyranny itself, Southampton included. And Shakespeare, as their champion, is the voice of the resistance. Both the narrative poems are deeply unpopular today, but were huge hits in their time. The reason for that, argues Asquith, was that they conjured a “dark world” of an England heading towards crisis. When we see “late Tudor and early Stuart England as a police state,” she writes, we can understand “the sudden explosion of sectarian hatred that fueled the Civil War.”