Shakespeare's Universality: Here's Fine Revolution

Through close readings of a wide range of plays and poems, Kiernan Ryan's compelling polemic sets out to reclaim the idea of Shakespeare's timeless universality from reactionary and radical critics alike. Its argument is driven throughout by the belief that at this moment in history the need to recognise and activate the revolutionary potential of Shakespeare's drama is more urgent than ever.The volume has been shortlisted for the European Society for the Study of English 2016 Prize for the best critical study in the field of Literatures in the English Language.

[Ryan] argues powerfully against the 'arid antiquarianism' of historicist scholarship, and offers instead a Shakespeare always out of sync with his own time and thus able to transcend it ... [A] highly readable book., [This] cogent and passionate appropriation of “the idea of Shakespeare’s timeless universality” is a critical tour de force that draws on concepts that have long animated Ryan’s work ... [A] riveting, beautifully argued, and important book., This daring book is a recent addition to the Bloomsbury/Arden series, Shakespeare NOW! … [which] strives to capture the “excitement, audacity and surprise” of Shakespeare with short books that are “imaginative and provocative.” Kiernan Ryan’s Shakespeare’s Universality is both of these. Ryan works diligently to redeem Shakespeare’s universality from conservative essentialism and recast it in the light of visionary egalitarian change. This egalitarian vision, Ryan contends, makes the plays genuinely universal. Ryan’s premise is that Shakespeare’s plays reveal his “profound commitment” to the “potential of all human beings to live according to principles of freedom, equality and justice”., This is a provocative and fascinating “brief polemic” (p. xvi) whose lean and agile argument addresses the difficult topic of why and in what ways Shakespeare has maintained such a wide and universal appeal through a period of some four hundred years.

Kiernan Ryan is Professor of English Language and Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK and an Emeritus Fellow of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, UK.