Michael D. Bristol's Big-Time Shakespeare is a timely and important book. Timely because it engages in the continuing dispute over Shakespeare's place in the cultural economy of the western world, and important because it furthers that dispute in ways that suggest the sterile oppositions that have characterised it for so long may at length give way to a reasoned truce.

This is not to say that Bristol avoids controversy. His opening chapter castigates the late Helen Gardner for a treatment of theoretical approaches that "is neither competent nor particularly engaging". He is impatient with conservative critics generally. But he directs at the gurus of cultural materialism almost equally damaging criticism, seeing Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy as attacking an essentialist humanism that is nowhere adequately defined or evaluated. Terence Hawkes, whose work, like Dollimore's, Bristol much admires, can only, he tells us, replace "a dogmatic essentialism with an equally dogmatic, self-defeating functionalism".

Bristol's approach is to bring to bear the Bakhtinian notion of the entry of the major work of art into the "great time" (or more colloquially "big time"), permitting it to occupy a place in the longue duree of culture without sacrificing its specificity or its versatility. Shakespeare's plays, he assures us, "do not consist of empty signifiers freely available for opportunistic appropriations". On the contrary, they come to the interpreter already "thick with interpretations", so that their uses are "more correctly viewed as the discovery of latent semantic potentiality". This stance allows Bristol to pay attention to the verbal and structural richness of the original scripts, as artefacts of their authorship and time, while remaining alert to the ideological manipulations to which it is thenceforward subject.

The bulk of Bristol's book's first half is devoted to showing how theatre performance and the printing trade, the double locus of our knowledge of Shakespeare, represented "the competing institutional regimes" of incipient capitalism, and so modified in characteristic ways what the plays were and could be. He is particularly good on Davenant's entrepreneurial instinct for turning Shakespeare into business, and even better on the influence of the publishing house of Jacob Tonson and his nephews on the establishment of a literary canon, putting a distinctive spin on the commercial considerations that prompted Rowe, Johnson, Stevens and Pope to edit Shakespeare. But the commentary is not confined to an earlier period. Bristol analyses the ways in which the commercial sponsorship of Stratford Ontario benefits and limits the Shakespeare available on stage, appealing as it does to an educated and economically secure community of taste, but one that is not (in Bristol's view) high-brow.

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Yet it is precisely in the area of theatre practice that Bristol's work shows its limitations. The discussion of Shakespeare as part of the cultural production of the early-modern period is insufficiently grounded in the day-to-day workings of theatre companies, nor is today's Shakespeare shown to be nearly as various, artistically, economically and socially, as it is. In common with so much cultural history, this is an account of theatre that is more comfortable with film and the media than it is with the performed realities of the stage.

The second half of the book deals mainly with the interpretation of three plays, The Winter's Tale, Othello and Hamlet, with glances at The Merchant of Venice. His analysis is unsurprisingly led by his own experienced interest in carnival, especially when discussing Othello, which he reads as a comedy of abjection transmitted through the structures of charivari. Drawing on the apparently paradoxical notion of theatre as knowledgeable misrecognition, he interprets the Moor as a comically monstrous embodiment of the bridegroom, Desdemona as transvestite (played by a boy) and Iago as demythologiser, all in the service of a charivari-like mockery of transgressive marriage. A strategy such as this recovers at the least the potential offensiveness of the play, in parallel with the offensiveness Bristol makes plain in The Merchant of Venice.

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His discussion of The Winter's Tale reads the play in relation to conceptions of time as both festal and practical, extending this by interpreting Leontes's jealousy as "a type of spatio-temporal derangement of the ethos of gift, hospitality, and expenditure, mandated by the observances of the Winter Festival or Christmas-tide". In this reading, the bear becomes a creature both destructive and recreative who emerges from her cave at Candlemas to devour the souls of evil men. This is illuminating. What is more difficult to take is Bristol's view of the play's second half as exhibiting a species of market economy, with the statue as the ultimate in luxury goods and Leontes's redemption brought about not by grace but as a result of "his own bold, risk-taking decisions combined with his patience and enormous capacity for deferral". This is the man also described as the perpetrator of murderous folly in a play that participates in the history of violence against women. The two views may be reconciled, but with difficulty.

Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 is no less innovative than Bristol in its contribution to Shakespeare studies, but is a good deal more overt (some might say self-advertising) in its claims on our attention. Still, volume 2, following its precursor volume after an interval of ten years, is noticeably milder in its accents and for the most part more considerate in its rhetoric. John Drakakis, in the book's afterword, acknowledges that what he designates advances in critical inquiry have brought with them their own problems. The discussion of Caliban in relation to racism, for instance, now has to admit that there is not one but a series of histories of colonisation. There are, in other words, deficiencies of scholarship to mend if the self-confident claims of alternative Shakespeares are to be truly vindicated.

Terence Hawkes's introduction is among the best things in the book, deftly laying out a chronology of traditional Shakespeare criticism and knowledgeably and boldly (as he promises) summarising new historicism and cultural materialism. It is a sign of the times that Tillyard is now judged only "to a degree" mistaken, and his work said to be "complex". Demonised in his place is the newish enemy Harold Bloom, whose criticism is deemed "portentous". True critical endeavour, we learn, emerges under the aegis of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a swerve (Bloom might say) that borrows the prestige of the social sciences without engaging in the research that underpins it. Steven Mullaney would accept the generalship of Geertz, but his account of events, "After the new historicism", though good as a critique of the movement's shortcomings, reads like an echo from battles long ago (1988, that is), so fast moving is critical fashion. Two essays develop witty conceits that are variously illuminating, Catherine Belsey's nice association of Cleopatra's seductiveness with the boy actor playing the role and with European paintings of "pretty dimpled boys", and Margreta de Grazia's elaboration of the analogy between sexuality and moveable type. There are other pieces to enjoy, including Philip Armstrong's subtly complex discussion of theatre's unsettling capacity to invert "the hegemonic play of the gaze", Dympna Callaghan's investigation of the absence of real (as against fictional) black men on the Elizabethan stage, and Alan Sinfield's informative lesson on "How to read The Merchant of Venice without being heterosexist".

The book's major essay, however, is Keir Elam's lament for the infertility of theatre semiotics (despite his own distinguished contributions to that area). Noting the overwhelming preoccupation with stricken flesh and disjecta membra in recent drama studies, under the banner of Michel Foucault, Elam mourns the reduction of the actor's body to a mere "sign vehicle", a case of symptomatology rather than semiotics. The deplorable absence is criticism that can deal with performance in all its various signifying modes. Even if Elam's brief study here of Brook's Timon and Cheek-by-Jowl's Twelfth Night can do no more than point the way towards a more fertile and fully theorised semiotics, it is encouraging to find an essay that so decisively looks towards a development of alternative Shakespeares that, while drawing plentifully on the achievements of what has become virtually mainstream criticism, acknowledges the limitations of the movement and the need for new departures.

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Ronnie Mulryne is professor of English, University of Warwick.