Was Shakespeare a Tory?: The Bard is now a subject of political controversy. David Lister reports

SHAKESPEARE, anarchist or Tory, upholder of traditional values or subversive? The struggle for the Bard's soul is being fought in the world of academia.

Lining up on either side of the argument are some of the country's most respected Shakespeare scholars, and on one thing they all agree: his works are undergoing a fundamental reappraisal.

Michael Bogdanov, founder and artistic director of the English Shakespeare Company, says that schools should not teach Shakespeare for 20 years and neither should any of his work be performed, while a rethink takes place. To get things going, he has decided that he will not direct a Shakespeare play for five years.

Others, including Lord Lawson, the former chancellor of the exchequer, argue that some of the plays were written from a Tory standpoint and that Shakespeare was a strong royalist.

Mr Bogdanov, who is currently rehearsing Romeo and Juliet, says: 'The only way Romeo's and Juliet's parents can measure the worth of their children is in gold. Look at Romeo's speech to the apothecary: 'There is thy gold, worse poison to men's souls,/Doing more murders in this loathsome world/Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell:/I sell thee poison, thou hast sold me none.' He is saying that money is the real poison in the world. This nice, romantic wimp gives a whole social and political comment on the value of money.'

Not perhaps how this play - one of the Government's prescribed three texts for 14-year-olds - will generally be taught. But that, says Bogdanov, illustrates the problem.

In fact, he says, Shakespeare is full of 'invisible bullets', the elements that are potentially embarrassing and are often ignored or cut by those who want to see the plays as 'shoring up the system with its class divisions and government by divine right'.

'We must reclaim Shakespeare for the anarchists,' Bogdanov goes on. 'He was a challenge to society, but this is not the Shakespeare that is taught or, on the whole, performed. Shakespeare is never used as a social and political dramatist. He is used as a moral dramatist.'

Lord Lawson does not see Shakespeare as an anarchist. He said in an interview that 'Shakespeare was a Tory without any doubt', adding that Coriolanus, espousing 'the Roman virtues, the Tory virtues', was 'written from a Tory point of view.'

Brian John, an English teacher at King Edward VI Grammar School in Chelmsford, adopts a similar approach to literary criticism, showing that the Lawson philosophy continues down the line into the classroom. He told a recent conference: 'Shakespeare was a great enthusiast of royalty and a true Conservative.'

Elaborating on this, he explained to me: 'I do feel that he must be generally a Conservative in asserting the basic principle of the desire for stability and order. Just look at the 'degree speech' in Troilus and Cressida. Take his whole philosophy of history. He has a low opinion of rebellion: look at the Jack Cade example in Henry VI Part Two. And as a person he knew how to handle his finances and was upwardly mobile.'

The dispassionate Shakespeare Institute in Stratford- upon-Avon, an academic centre for the furtherance of understanding of the Bard, recognises that the battle lines over Shakespeare are changing.

Its director, Professor Stanley Wells, says: 'There is an academic conflict over Shakespeare. A lot of critics of the cultural materialism school are arguing that the plays contain elements of subversion which haven't been adequately recognised in the past.'

Alan Sinfield, of Sussex University's English department, ought to be a leader of the Young Turks preaching cultural materialism. He has just written a book entitled Fault Lines: cultural materialism and the politics of dissident reading and claims cohorts at several universities outside Oxbridge.

'Cultural materialism,' he explains, 'is materialism as opposed to idealism. Idealism says there's an ideal conception of a Shakespeare play, a reading that transcends all performances. Materialism says it is located in a political and historical context, his context but also ours.

'In the old days the thing you were meant to do with a literary text was to point out how whole and complete it was. The trick now is to do the opposite, to look for the gaps and silences and stress and pressure points.

'As you start looking for the fault lines, the text reveals its project. If you look at Desdemona, for example, she starts off incredibly spunky. She tells the Senate she wants to go off and have sex with her husband. Later she has turned into a nagging wife. Then she lies back and says 'I've done wrong but don't kill me yet'. It's not really a continuous character, it's a series of stereotypes and the play is deploying those stereotypes as a political representation to explore gender politics.'