Shakespeare and the Poetics and Politics of Relevance

Four years on from George Floyd’s murder, this volume asks if and how Shakespeare might be relevant—whether in performance, in the classroom, or in scholarship—to the pressing issues of social and climate justice. This question, however, is accompanied by the acute and uncomfortable recognition that there have been other consequences to the awakening of the world since Floyd's death, including the call to cancel Shakespeare altogether. This volume, however, is not an apology for Shakespeare but rather an engagement with him. From the perspective of the scholars who contribute here, questions about Shakespeare in our current context are not only deeply enmeshed with issues about his historical, geographical, and performance context and its attendant alterity, but crucially also to the specifically literary forms and structures with which he worked. Even as these essays resist the idea of a “timeless,” universalist Shakespeare, they insist upon the “poetics,” the creative framework, the specifically literary dimensions of the plays that cannot be reduced to any paraphrasable content. These are precisely the features that facilitate and enable the “relevance” of Shakespeare’s works even across the chasm of the centuries since he composed them Dympna Callaghan is University Professor of English and William L. Safire Professor of Modern Letters at Syracuse University, USA. She is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and has published widely on early modern literature and is the author or editor of fourteen books and many essays and scholarly articles. Her most recent book is Reading Shakespeare’s Poetry (2023). In addition, she is the editor of the Arden Shakespeare Language and Writing series, and with Michael Dobson she is co-editor of the Palgrave Shakespeare Studies series. She is the lead editor on the collaborative Gender Edition of digital Asian Intercultural Archive project. Sophie Chiari is Professor of early modern English literature at Université Clermont Auvergne, France. A specialist of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, she is particularly interested in ecocriticism. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment: The Early Modern Fated Sky (2019), and Shakespeare and the Environment: A Dictionary (2022). She has edited or co-edited various collections of essays, including Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare (2019) with John Mucciolo, and The Experience of Disaster in Early Modern English Literature (2022).