Shakespeare: His Infinite Variety – Celebrating the 400th Anniversary of His Death

It might appear that everything has been already said about Shakespeare, and yet new theatrical productions show how well Shakespeare’s plays function in new contexts and surprising interpretations. The great asset of Shakespeare: His Infinite Variety is its wide historical and geographical range – that is, from the time of the Bard himself to the latest metamorphoses of meanings that new electronic media has made available. Every reader, depending on his/her age and prior experience with Shakespeare, is at a different moment of this great historical-theoretical continuum of world culture. Everyone can also begin one’s own intellectual journey through cultural history – any time, any place. Despite the once popular but now outdated claim, history has not ended. This volume testifies to the benefits of combining historical perspective in its fairly elementary version, which is a linear sequence of events, with an in-depth analysis of the transformations in understanding, exhibiting, and using (appropriating) Shakespeare’s works in our rapidly changing reality. -- Marta Wiszniowska-Majchrzyk, professor emerita, Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw