A while ago I was lucky enough to spend a year living in Munich. When I was there I went to several productions by a company called the New Theatre, and I got to know its founder and director, an Englishman called Paul Stebbings. I asked him about his experiences putting on plays all over the world. He said that, no matter where they went – China, South America, India – their adaptations of Shakespeare achieved some degree of palpable connection with the audience, notwithstanding the fact that for many in those audiences this would have been their first encounter with Shakespeare’s plays. Paul then spoke about the company’s dramatised version of Gulliver’s Travels, a work which (to judge from the number of languages into which it has been translated) you might imagine would have a strong global appeal. But apparently it left audiences cold. Surely, I thought, there is something here that requires an explanation.
Before 1950, however, none would have been necessary. Then a traditional view of Shakespeare’s greatness, most memorably expressed by Samuel Johnson, held the field: namely, that Shakespeare was the pre-eminent “poet of nature”, and that his plays were peopled with “the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply and observation will always find”. For Johnson the key principle of widespread and durable literary popularity was clear: “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.”
The migration of high theory from the social sciences to the literary humanities which occurred in the second half of the 20th century displaced that well-established way of thinking about how and why great literature holds and rewards our attention. Suddenly all the commonsensical ideas about language and literature which had seemed so unproblematic that one could safely treat them as axioms – for instance, the belief that works of literature had discoverable (albeit often very complex) meanings, or the idea that language was a system of signification which referred to things outside itself – were denounced as mere prejudices. As a result, both limbs of Johnson’s memorable phrase – “just representations of general nature” – were put under devastating pressure.
Theoretical critiques took pleasure in unmasking the idea of a “just representation” as a delusion. According to these theorists, literature could do nothing more than point mournfully and repetitiously to its own impotence as representation. Delusional, too, was the concept of a “general nature”. Politically minded theorists contended that what we had been offered as the “natural” tended, when examined more closely and less sympathetically, to reveal itself as a socially constructed fiction dictated by dominant, oppressive, usually male, western European and white interests. And since those interests were themselves neither timeless nor universal, no more timeless or universal were the fictions of the natural that they had been used to create.
So a “just representation” was impossible for two reasons. Literary representation was itself a fallacy, and even if it were not, it could not be “just” in either sense of that complex word, since it could be neither precise nor fair.
This was more a dogma than an empirical finding, but even so it laid down a vigorous challenge to the traditional view. But can that view be restated and reframed so as to neutralise that challenge? How might the idea of Shakespeare as the pre-eminent poet of a general human nature be rehabilitated?
Certainly not by arguing that Shakespeare possessed any timeless esoteric wisdom that he wished to impart through the medium of drama; still less by insisting that his plays were committed to an idea of human nature that is either immobile or unchanging. A more fruitful line might be to approach human nature as a series of perennial preoccupations which have been raised in different ways in different places and at different times, but which nevertheless provide threads of continuity across the centuries of recorded human experience.
Examples of such preoccupations might be: the question of personal identity; the distinction between civilisation and barbarism; the purpose and character of political institutions; and the tangle of ethical questions surrounding the stubborn difficulty we encounter in deciding between the good and the right, and between means and ends. It seems hard to believe that any human group, at any time or in any place, has been perfectly uninterested in questions of the distinction between self and other, of the concept of personal identity, of the principle that confers or withholds legitimacy and authority within a group and of the proper purposes of such authority, and of the discrimination of a good action from a bad or selfish one. Of course, the various responses to these perennial and ubiquitous problems have varied, sometimes dramatically, and will no doubt continue to do so in the future. The areas of concern, however, seem to be as universal as anything human can ever be.
The preoccupations I have just listed share a further important characteristic. They all raise issues on which it is impossible honestly to be of only one mind; and hence they are intrinsically dramatic. Do we not from day to day constantly experience the tug of contending intellectual loyalties and commitments? Are we not perpetually drawn by the allure of rival goods, neither of which we are willing entirely to relinquish? In our mundane dealings we rely on the solidity of the concept of personal identity, but, when we reflect upon that concept, we can see a myriad of powerful arguments against it. We both benefit from the affordances of civilisation, and yet also chafe against the constraints civilisation imposes upon us in order to deliver those benefits. We both see our political institutions as utilitarian, man-made contrivances assembled to deliver practical benefits to the governed, yet recognise that those institutions need also to be hedged about with an artificial aura of, if not necessarily supernatural, then certainly of a more-than natural potency and authority if they are to function effectively. We readily denounce the immorality of treating other people as instruments, while at the same time availing ourselves of other people in countless ways every day. However vehemently we may renounce one or other of them, in practice (as the writings of even the greatest philosophers demonstrate) we are torn between the rival claims of expediency and right.
Shakespeare responded to our conflicted nature more insistently and more imaginatively than any other author. He explored these preoccupations from quite different standpoints, relying in different plays on very different presuppositions, pursuing very different angles of vision, and thus generating very different outcomes. A repeated feature of Shakespeare’s drama is that we often see him (to borrow a phrase from Emilia in Othello) turning his wit “the seamy-side without”, and doing so, moreover, often in plays composed either concurrently or successively. Examples of this include King Lear and Measure for Measure, or Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, or Timon of Athens and The Tempest.
It is impossible to imagine even so great a playwright as Ben Jonson doing anything like this – for instance, writing a whole-heartedly festive comedy immediately after writing the brilliant satiric demolition of festive comedy which is Bartholomew Fair. Jonson, like most writers – indeed, like almost all human beings – was imprisoned within his opinions. Shakespeare, on the other hand, seems to have had no settled opinions, despite overflowing with ideas. “Others abide our question. Thou art free,” as Matthew Arnold put it, with detectable feelings of envy, admiration and bafflement (and with the silent and affronted ghost of Old Hamlet in the opening scene of that play powerfully in mind).
A study of Shakespeare written along the lines I have just sketched is sure to displease certain groups. It will find little favour with the dramaturgical antiquarians, who wish to confine Shakespeare within the historical archive of early modern drama. Similarly those whose penchant is to view Shakespeare’s plays as posing a series of knotty problems in early-modern authorship are unlikely to thrill to such an account.
But it may be that people of a broad and general intellectual culture, who enjoy Shakespeare’s plays but have been puzzled to account for their extraordinary reach, will find food for thought in such an argument. It at least tries to address, rather than ignoring, what Shakespeare’s plays require us to understand about our shared human nature, and the power of great art to represent it.
David Womersley’s new book, “Thinking Through Shakespeare”, is published by Princeton University Press
[Further reading: International law is not dead]
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This article appears in the 11 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great British Crisis
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