Shakespeare and Modern Culture

From one of the world's premier Shakespeare scholars comes 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" true: ideas about human character, individuality and selfhood, government, leadership, love and jealousy, men and women, youth and age. Marjorie Garber delves into ten plays to explore the interrelationships between Shakespeare and contemporary culture, from James Joyce'sUlyssesto George W. Bush's reading list. From the persistence of difference inOthelloto the matter of character inHamletto the untimeliness of youth inRomeo and Juliet, Garber discusses how these ideas have been re-imagined in modern fiction, theater, film, and the news, and in the literature of psychology, sociology, political theory, business, medicine, and law.Shakespeare and Modern Cultureis a brilliant recasting of our own mental and emotional landscape as refracted through the prism of the protean Shakespeare.

Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and Chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, at Harvard University. Shakespeare After All was named one of the five best nonfiction books of 2004 by Newsweek and received the 2005 Christian Gauss Book Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


From the Hardcover edition.