Shakespeare’s Universality: Here’s Fine Revolution by Kiernan Ryan (review)

This daring book is a recent addition to the Bloomsbury/Arden series, Shakespeare NOW! According to the Bloomsbury website, the series strives to capture the “excitement, audacity and surprise” of Shakespeare with short books that are “imaginative and provocative.” Kiernan Ryan’s Shakespeare’s Universality is both of these. Ryan works diligently to redeem Shakespeare’s universality from conservative essentialism and recast it in the light of visionary egalitarian change. This egalitarian vision, Ryan contends, makes the plays genuinely universal. Ryan’s premise is that Shakespeare’s plays reveal his “profound commitment” to the “potential of all human beings to live according to principles of freedom, equality and justice” (9).

Politically, it is vital to Ryan’s project that his construction of Shakespearean universality escapes confusion with “reactionary reconstructions,” such as essentialism (x). Ryan negotiates a new course between Johnsonian notions of “common humanity” and the currently prevailing orthodoxy that such assumptions are manifestations of cultural imperialism. In this context, it is worth remembering John Drakakis’s assertion in his seminal 1985 introduction to Alternative Shakespeares: “Shakespeare can never be ‘our contemporary’ except by the strategy of appropriation” (24). Drakakis aimed to relegate essentialism and its doctrine of a timelessly resonant Shakespeare to the dunghill of “unexamined assumptions and traditions” (25).¹ And, since that time, essentialism has widely been viewed as a manifestation of reactionary politics. Ryan does not exaggerate when he declares that essentialist ideas now “invite derision” from progressive, historicist academics (x). It is surprising, then, that anyone would actually endeavor to re-open what might seem to be a closed case.

This explains why Ryan tries so earnestly (and quite convincingly) to posit a new idea, independent of essentialist baggage, of how and why Shakespeare matters across boundaries of time, culture, and language. This is certainly a challenging project but, ultimately, Ryan might have been more relaxed in making his case. The urgency with which Ryan makes his argument is revealed by his frequent use of italics and his prolix quotation. It is an urgency that sometimes borders on anxiety, as he sets about to “show that the quality of timeless universality in a progressive sense is inherent in the plays” (6). At moments, he seems to be looking over his shoulder to make sure that the specter of Harold Bloom isn’t gaining on him to debunk his carefully wrought thesis. Ryan offers the remarkable and economical insight that Shakespeare was “a dramatist who dreamt up memories of the future” (131), going a long way to convince us that these plays were dramas of the possible purely on the force of his coherent and relentlessly consistent argument.

While Ryan deserves great credit for this effort, he sometimes finesses the plays to make them comfortable with his thesis. His short treatment of Othello is a case in point. While it is intriguing to consider the “egalitarian rationale” Ryan discovers behind Emilia’s “husbands’ faults” speech, the most energetic point of universality in the play is clearly sexual jealousy—an emotion of pure dystopian power that is elemental in human experience (IV.iii). Throughout his argument, Ryan calls attention to the “tension between painful realities and utopian possibilities” (62). But the sheer weight of betrayal, moral squalor and cruelty we encounter in this play alone is far more than the counterbalance it would appear to be in Ryan’s equation. Likewise, King Lear may very well learn in act three to empathize with “unaccommodated man,” but his transitory experience does not lead the audience to an egalitarian epiphany. Shakespeare simply doesn’t allow this. Minutes later, whatever humane equilibrium has been established through the sufferings of the rest of act three is annihilated by the blinding of Gloucester. By the end of the play, the shattered survivors can only wonder if they are truly standing on the edge of apocalypse—or just some horrible nightmare vision of it.

Ryan puts his own thesis to the test most impressively in...