In this book, Francis Barker combines readings of early modern English culture - mainly Shakespeare - and contemporary theories of modernity, postmodernity and history. The book falls into three distinct but related parts. Part one looks at King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth and the complex nexus of power, memory, space and time which inform these texts. Part 2 uses Milton and Hobbes as well as Shakespeare to critique recent theoretical approaches, such as deconstruction and New Historicism. Part 3 on the violence of culture radically challenges accepted notions of contemporary culture. What has come to be called culture, Barker suggests, is not an antidote to generalized violence, merely one of its more seductive strategies.