Afterword: The Fantasy of Relevance on the Shakespearean Stage

Abstract: Reflecting on the cluster of essays on Shakespeare and the New York stage in this issue, we argue that the promise of relevance both sustains and constricts contemporary Shakespearean performance. Since Jan Kott coined the phrase in the middle of the twentieth century, the prevailing ethos in Shakespearean performance is that he is, and ever will be, our contemporary, and this claim exerts enormous pressure on the performing arts as it intersects with the palimpsestic temporality of the stage, advancing a fantasy of universal Shakespearean relevance. The assumption that Shakespeare can represent all communities or can speak to every geopolitical situation is a romantic proposition, and one laden with generalizations about universal humanism, engendering a top-down transmission of meaning that can often alienate the very audiences that it aspires to connect with. Presence, or even presentism, is not necessarily the same as relevance, and continuing contemporaneity is not inherent to this particular group of four hundred-year-old plays: to the extent that Shakespeare’s plays remain salient for today’s audiences, they do so through constant change. Therefore, although it is one of the commonly used terms applied to Shakespearean stagings and frequently lauded as the driving force behind classical company missions, relevance, this essay contends, is not always a guaranteed condition of performance—and nor should it be. Instead, this essay suggests that the very concept of theater refutes such a premise when it invites audiences to suspend disbelief and enter the fantastical world of a play.