Influenced by continental philosophy, as well as Anglo-American criticism, he reads Shakespearean drama in terms of its agonistic conflict.

It is his research into the conditions of this conflict that led him to his proposition, in Secret Shakespeare, that 'the bloody question' of loyalty during Europe's wars of religion was hardwired into Shakespeare's dramatic imagination, and that in play after play the same scenario is repeated, when some sovereign or seducer, like King Lear, demands to know who 'doth love us', and a resister such as Cordelia responds: 'I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth'.

Shakespeare's 'theatre of shadows' stages 'the instability of the opposition between authorised and unauthorised violence' and 'the recognition of the reversibility of monsters and martyrs, terrorists and torturers, or artists and assassins', in this interpretation.

It maintains that the dramatist found artistic freedom by adopting an 'abject position' towards authority, and by staging 'the power of weakness' in the 'investiture crisis' of the age of absolutism.

Associated since the 1980s with the British Cultural Materialist school of criticism, according to Will Power (1993) Wilson's work aims to combine 'high theory and low archives'.