Like all great reputations, Shakespeare’s was created and curated in a particular historical setting. Over the past few decades, Shakespeare scholarship has explored and illuminated both the hinterland of Shakespeare’s own authorship – the nature and extent of his collaboration with others, the diffusion of his work during his lifetime – and the creation of a constantly expanding myth of the uniquely English genius, the secular patron saint of Anglo-Saxon civilisation and (eventually) empire. Acknowledging this means acknowledging that “Shakespeare” as a composite cultural artefact is not exempt from post-colonial critique.
This is only a matter for alarm if we are wedded to a Shakespeare who is not really a poet or dramatist at all, but a source of edifying quotations. What makes a poet’s stature durable is their capacity to provide us with the very tools we need to challenge and probe them, to enlarge our imaginative liberty as we read. A dramatic poet above all is one who has produced a sufficiently polyphonic work for us to hear the critical voices already at work within it.
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