https://youtu.be/8-vwJwv1gfo?is=OSb2zXAuS4rQPUni
The lecture—part of the University of Notre Dame London Shakespeare Lecture series—offers a polished and fashionable argument: “Shakespeare” is not a stable historical author but a fluid cultural construct, endlessly rewritten by performance, adaptation, and modern reception. It insists that meaning is produced in the present—by directors, audiences, and global reinterpretations—rather than anchored in any recoverable historical figure. This emphasis on plurality and reinvention is not new; it reflects a now-standard academic posture that privileges reception over origin and treats the plays less as authored works than as an evolving cultural process.
Yet this stance, for all its sophistication, quietly evades the central historical question: who actually wrote the works? By dissolving authorship into a cloud of “uses,” it risks turning a concrete problem into an aesthetic slogan. The celebration of ambiguity can feel less like intellectual openness than like a convenient retreat—one that protects orthodox assumptions by declaring the author irrelevant. In this sense, the talk is eloquent but evasive: it substitutes interpretive freedom for historical responsibility, and in doing so, naturally and inevitably leaves the most pressing question—authorship itself—curiously untouched.
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