The purpose of playing and the philosophy of history

Shakespeare was a pervasive presence in the life and work of C. L. R. James, and, along with cricket, was one of the veteran radical's most abiding concerns. In this essay, I set out to explore some of the implications of James' Shakespeare criticism. In Shakespeare's plays, particularly Hamlet and King Lear, James traced the historical provenance of some of the critical problematics of human society, and outlined a challenging method of dialectical literary criticism. This method attended to seemingly contradictory critical tasks, historicism and universalism, allowing James to use Shakespeare as an occasion for dialectical analyses which went far beyond literary criticism alone. James understood Shakespeare as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon, and by exploring how he is able to think both these possibilities at once, it is possible to trace his unique understanding of the critical relationship between the past and the present, and the role of creative activity in mediating between them.