[1] After leaving school at fifteen he took a job operating a lathe in a car factory, and spent much of his spare time riding motorbikes at high speeds.
He later wrote: "I was discovering back then that philosophy was not only more important than the academic study of it allowed, but that as a subject it needed to be turned against the academy which diminished it.
[5] However, he was awarded his PhD in 1984 when the University of London allowed him to submit his first book, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in lieu of a thesis.
To meet university regulations, the book was required to be housed inside a cardboard box identical in colour and size to a conventional thesis.
Oscar Wilde takes centre stage, but the book also discusses writers including André Gide, Freud, and Foucault, and topics such as desire, transgression, homophobia, and cross-dressing.
Death, Desire, and Loss (1998) In a wide-ranging survey from Anaximander to AIDS, Dollimore presses his case that the drive to relinquish the self has always lurked within Western notions of identity and can be found above all, "perversely, lethally, ecstatically" in sexuality.
[11] The book contains a lengthy discussion of what Dollimore calls "wishful theory," and the development of his idea of the daemonic: the inhumane values found at the heart of literature and civilization that traditional critics have ignored.
This means rejecting critical clichés such as the idea that Shakespeare’s works demonstrate a revelation of something called ‘human nature’, and instead paying attention to the actual circumstances in which texts are written and read.
Thus where traditional criticism sees Shakespeare’s era as one that comfortably maintained a conservative political status quo, cultural materialism finds evidence of dissent and subversion.
"[16] Wishful theory This phrase is used by Dollimore in his later work to refer to versions of cultural criticism that have abandoned "the effort to understand the historical real as we inherit and live it".
Civilization, Dollimore writes, "is, at some level, profoundly and necessarily limited, focused and exclusionary, built on repressions which remain constitutive.
[24] In "Then and Now" (2014), Dollimore reflects upon cultural materialism and the publication of Political Shakespeare, and goes on to examine the question of human nature through the lens of evolutionary biology.