«We live in the 21st century. "Some leggings and a doublet don't bring us any closer to Shakespeare than jeans and a T-shirt." This is said by Paul Edmondson, who several decades of reading and critical thinking allow him to maintain the aphoristic and unruly tone of a great professor throughout entire books, for example this one. Edmondson is one of the greatest experts on Shakespeare's life and work that can be found, and also one of his heirs in the sense of "telling what is true, not what is due" (King Lear). Maybe because he knows that Shakespeare will always return us to our own subjectivity, to what we want to think with him. And perhaps that is why he has no qualms in stating that "the British Empire exported Shakespeare and imposed him everywhere along with the English language", while making clear how, and why, the incontestable genius of the famous poet and playwright does not It has lost validity and internationality since then; how he has become “culturally promiscuous.” Edmondson gives an account of the way Shakespeare speaks to us all, and why his political sensibility is timeless. Thus he tells us that Hitler banned a production of Julius Caesar in Germany, and how the more human than local character of the work converted a staging of Love's Labor in Vain in Kabul in 2005 - which for the first time in thirty years showed men and women together on stage—in an act as daring as a performance of Othello in apartheid Johannesburg.

Why Shakespeare? Here is the question that articulates all these pages and that Edmondson has been asking himself for a lifetime. And here is a book full of answers that, at the same time, raise a number of other questions that only we can answer. Prerogatives of art and its reception.