The first Introduction to Part I defines the book’s three central concepts of the political, the aesthetic, and the utopian and shows a Shakespearean trajectory within the sequence of plays about power that grows more and critical before turning to utopian alternatives to power politics. It then reviews the history of how Shakespearean critics have framed and conceptualized the theme of power in Shakespeare, with emphasis on the second half of the twentieth century up to recent decades to provide context for what follows. Finally, the last section takes up the issue of how Shakespeare’s approach to politics evolves and changes over the approximately twenty years of his writing career, from an initial period of political eclecticism in the early histories and Titus, to a period of the acceptance of amoral power in the second Henriad and Julius Caesar, to the tragic period, which turns to indictments of political cruelty and immorality, and finally to a late period of utopian alternatives to politics.

This Introduction seeks to map the history of Gothic scholarship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as the academic discipline we might now call Gothic Studies came into being. It draws lines of connection between works through four significant, overlapping stages: the first wave of Gothic criticism between the 1920s and the 1960s; the emergence of Gothic Studies as an academic discipline from the late 1970s to the early 2000s; the increasing understanding of Gothic as a ‘contemporary’ mode in the 1980s and beyond; and finally, what can be seen as the institutionalisation of Gothic in the twenty-first century. In doing so, it argues that Gothic Studies in the twenty-first century is simultaneously at its most fertile and at an impasse, a complex deadlock that Gothic scholars of the future must resolve.