Shakespeare and the Poetics and Politics of Relevance

<p>Four years on from George Floyd���s murder this volume asks if and how Shakespeare might be relevant���whether in performance in the classroom or in scholarship���to the pressing issues of social and climate justice. This question however is accompanied by the acute and uncomfortable recognition that there have been other consequences to the awakening of the world since Floyd's death including the call to cancel Shakespeare altogether. This volume however is not an apology for Shakespeare but rather an engagement with him. From the perspective of the scholars who contribute here questions about Shakespeare in our current context are not only deeply enmeshed with issues about his historical geographical and performance context and its attendant alterity but crucially also to the specifically literary forms and structures with which he worked. Even as these essays resist the idea of a ���timeless��� universalist Shakespeare they insist upon the ���poetics��� the creative framework the specifically literary dimensions of the plays that cannot be reduced to any paraphrasable content.  These are precisely the features that facilitate and enable the ���relevance��� of Shakespeare���s works even across the chasm of the centuries since he composed them.</p>