Shakespeare and the Poetics and Politics of Relevance: An Introduction

The word “relevance” did not exist in Shakespeare’s time even though its synonyms and precursors abound in his work. Then as now, the plays needed to make a connection with the audience, to demonstrate some bearing upon their life experience, even as the robust apparatus of Elizabethan and Jacobean censorship precluded making obtrusively topical political references. This introduction asks whether and how Shakespeare is relevant in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the COVID pandemic, the #MeToo movement, and the climate crisis produced by the human devastation of our environment. However, we also ask whether relevance is something that, in certain contexts, should not, perhaps, be embraced so eagerly but rather resisted in favor of a more profound understanding of historical determinants. Shakespeare’s cultural value, after all, does not consist only in his relevance understood in such narrow terms that the plays and poems are reduced to being a list of correspondences with or mere allegories for our times. While it is crucial to ask if Shakespeare is relevant, it is equally important to inquire, especially in relation to marginal and global communities, “Relevant to whom?” Further, while issues of politics and social and environmental justice can be readily understood under the rubric of relevance, Shakespeare’s poetics is less obviously amenable to it. However, the “poetics,” the creative framework, the specifically literary features of the plays that cannot be reduced to any paraphrasable content, are precisely the features that facilitate and enable the “relevance” of Shakespeare’s works even across the chasm of the centuries since Shakespeare composed them.