All the world’s a stage

Peter Conrad on Shakespeare

his 20 books published since 1973, Peter Conrad has led readers to insights they could hardly have stumbled across on their own, whether the matter is literature, history, movies, opera, mythology, or a host of other topics. In Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our World, he turns his razor-sharp focus on the Bard and, predictably, leaves his readers dazzled, exhausted, and enriched.

Conrad, who retired in 2018 after 45 years of teaching at Christ Church, Oxford, offers an encyclopedic yet personal meditation on Shakespeare. He is virtuosic in his scholarship, yet his presentation is free from the lethargy that infects so much academic writing. Having thoroughly digested all of Shakespeare’s plays, he redistributes their ideas into chapters that ruminate broadly on nine subjects, from I “So Long Lives This,” about how the playwright was characterized in his time and in posterity, to “And This Gives Life to Thee,” which mostly deals with viewpoints of specific productions and how current social and political issues inform presentations as recent as the New York Shakespeare Festival’s 2017

which “presented Rome’s would-be despot as an orange-maned vulgarian who rants on Twitter.”

Most of the book penetrates the texts themselves and how they reveal a multifaceted conception of the world and its occupants. Conrad, one might say, charts a road map of Shakespeare’s brain, where the neurons buzz apace. What is the world? “Shakespeare, like Puck, engirdles the earth: his theatre is global by both name and nature,” he writes. What is man? A piece of work noble in reason, infinite in faculty, the paragon of animals, the quintessence of dust, according to Hamlet, but also an unfinished being, seeking completion in complementary selves — like Antipholus, half of a set of separated twins in

who “first compares himself to ‘a drop of water/That in the ocean seeks another drop.’ ”

Duality and paradox are everywhere in Shakespeare: two characters perceived to be one (as in

or the separated siblings of or one perceived to be two (disguises abound, often involving gender swaps and cross-dressing) — or, for that matter, through the mash-up of dramatic genres, as when the Rude Mechanicals in

offer a play described as “very tragical mirth.” Shakespeare’s delineation of characters is