Shakespeare and Modern Culture

Published by Pantheon, 2008, hardcover, index, 321 pages, condition: new.

From one of the worlds premier Shakespeare scholars, author of Shakespeare After All (the indispensable introduction to the indispensable writer Newsweek): a magisterial new study whose premise is that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare. 
Shakespeare has determined many of the ideas that we think of as naturally our own and even as naturally true ideas about human character, individuality and selfhood, government, leadership, love and jealousy, men and women, youth and age. Yet many of these ideas, timely as ever, have been reimagined (indeed, are often now first encountered) not only in modern fiction, theater, film, and the news but also in the literature of psychology, sociology, political theory, business, medicine, and law.

Marjorie Garber delves into ten plays to explore the interrelationships between Shakespeare and twentieth century and contemporary culture from James Joyces Ulysses to George W. Bushs reading list. In The Merchant of Venice, she looks at the question of intention; in Hamlet, the matter of character; in King Lear, the dream of sublimity; in Othello, the persistence of difference; and in Macbeth, the necessity of interpretation. She discusses the conundrum of man in The Tempest; the quest for exemplarity in Henry V; the problem of fact in Richard III; the estrangement of self in Coriolanus; and the untimeliness of youth in Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare and Modern Culture is a tour de force reimagining of our own mental and emotional landscape as refracted through the prism of protean Shakespeare.