Most of the book penetrates the texts themselves and how they reveal a mulitfaceted conception of the world and its occupants.

Other meditations ponder the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis (cited in which maintains that consciousness can migrate from one being to another; how kings and military men of the histories and tragedies beget leaders of later eras; how vocabulary and speech inform character (“Power is vocal. Jack Cade, who leads a populist revolt in persecutes literacy.”); how novelists, composers, and choreographers took possession of Shakespeare. One can’t predict where this book will lead.

This slender volume of 262 pages is dense with insight. It is best consumed in small bites. Page 52, for instance, touches on The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, and Twelfth Night, making shrewd observations about each of them, the whole adding up to a rich meditation on how characters present themselves to the world. Sometimes Conrad’s assertions can be puzzling at first glance. “Through their sheer volubility,” he writes, “the plays demonstrate that language is our shared creation, which each one of us personally reinvents. In this polyphony, the one voice we never hear is Shakespeare’s own.” A reader might protest that Shakespeare’s is the voice of every character, from Rosalind to Rosenkrantz. But Conrad’s point is that Shakespeare camouflages whatever his own voice might be by bestowing it on, or filtering it through, an overarching cast of characters that is as broad as humankind. (“The truest poetry is the most feigning,” remarks Touchstone in In the end, Conrad sees Shakespeare-the-author as a master of literary evasion, which he surely is — even to the extent that his very identity continues to be questioned by fringe enthusiasts.

This breathtaking book is a cerebral celebration of Shakespeare past and present. “Shakespeare himself is reverently remembered, but his characters are still alive, thriving inside us,” Conrad observes. They are humanity itself. “Falstaff smiles at the world, Lear berates it, and Feste in his parting song at the end of jauntily copes with its sodden daily disappointments.”

Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our World by Peter Conrad is published by