For all time

To review some new books about Shakespeare is not to note a revival of interest, but simply to let down a bucket into an undammed river. No one really knows the scale of the secondary bibliography. Published sources on any given topic in Shakespeare studies are innumerable and, as James Shapiro reminds us, so are books devoted to the idea that the works were written by someone else.

There are two theories to account for why Shakespeare is still so enormously prevalent in cultural life nearly 400 years after he died. The first is the cynical one, that it suited the British empire, and Anglo-Saxon culture in general, to foist the values and standards of one of its own on the rest of the world. If the political history of the world had been different, it is argued, we would now be talking about the universal genius of Avveroes or Lady Murasaki. Different cultures have different literary values; those of Shakespeare, we are told, were backed up by an empire, an army and a great trading nation.

The second, less cynical, is convinced that there are, indeed, universal human values in Shakespeare which hardly any other writer has ever mastered on such a scale. We know exactly what deranged grief is like, equally from Hamlet as from our own experience; we listen to an explanation of first love, and marvel that it was so very much the same for a man in doublet and hose as for a spotty youth in a hoody. These universal significances override the undoubted fact that a good deal of Shakespeare’s poetry is now obscure to most of us, as some of it must always have been. There are passages in Coriolanus and other later plays which can never have been generally understood.

There is some truth in both of these ideas.