William Shakespeare

is, to a certain degree, responsible for having created us. The world in which we live and think and philosophize is, as it were Shakespearized.

Both “of an age” and “for all time,” Shakespeare is the defining figure of the English Renaissance, and the most cited and quoted author of every era since. But if we create our own Shakespeare, it is at least as true that the Shakespeare we create is a Shakespeare that has, to a certain extent, created us. The world in which we live and think and philosophize is, to use Ralph Waldo Emerson's word, “Shakspearized.”

is capable of speaking directly to us, like a portrait whose eyes seem to follow you around the room, engaging your glance from every angle.

Like a portrait whose eyes seem to follow you around the room, engaging your glance from every angle, the plays and their characters seem always to be “modern,” always to be “us.”

is said to be timeless, and yet, his capacity to speak directly to circumstances, make him seem to possess an uncanny timeliness.

What is often described as the timelessness of Shakespeare, the transcendent qualities for which his plays have been praised around the world and across the centuries, is perhaps better understood as an uncanny timeliness, a capacity to speak directly to circumstances the playwright could not have anticipated or foreseen.

is surprisingly modern-seeming, but this is, in fact, because his language and his characters have created the lexicon of modernity.

But if Shakespeare seems to us in a surprising way so “modern,” it's because in a sense his language and his characters have created a lexicon of modernity. This is a book devoted in part to exploring the remarkable omnipresence of Shakespeare in our lives.

Marjorie GarberThinkers

Marjorie Garber