Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, from the Restoration to the Present

"It’s a very lively book. It’s a novel, in a way. It’s not quite as if Virginia Woolf’s Orlando were Shakespeare but it kind of is. There’s a sense of our hero moving through time and having different adventures along the way. That’s the narrative of this book. I think Taylor is a brilliant scholar, probably one of the most brilliant Shakespearians of our time. What he’s done in this book is condense a huge amount of work into something which is readable and interesting. He shows how people just wanted different things from Shakespeare at different times. Maybe at certain times they wanted him to be more classical, at others more English and his Englishness became important. Or they wanted to argue about whether the comedies or the tragedies were better, or whether he was good at women characters or not. Taylor takes these themes through history and shows that there isn’t an answer. This isn’t a historical progress, where we’re getting closer to an answer. It’s a really good reminder that what you can see at historical distance is that we invent the Shakespeare that we want or that speaks to our time. Sometimes you can’t quite see that when you’re doing it. You think, ‘This is objective Shakespeare’ or ‘This must be true.’ This book makes it quite clear that’s what we’re doing and what we’ve always done. There’s a great chapter where he talks about Shakespeare in the 18th century. Academic prose is not often the loveliest thing to read but this book really has fun with its own writing. Taylor writes the 18th-century chapter as if it were a novel. He talks about the encounter of Shakespeare with these different editors—this sequence of men who really did care about Shakespeare and argued about him. Other accounts make this seem deadly boring. It’s really hard to make it feel relevant or interesting now, but Taylor really brings it to life. Then he has a great chapter—which I suppose comes right up to his present—about a big argument at an American Shakespeare conference in the 1980s. The argument was about whether Shakespeare had revised his own plays. Do the two versions of King Lear that we have from 1608 and 1623 represent Shakespeare’s own revisions? It’s hard to think that that would have been such a hotly contested issue, but he talks about why that was such an electric moment in the scholarly discussions."