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On 27 April 2016, actor David Tennant appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for an interview during which Colbert inquired, “Why do you think Shakespeare is still so resonant to us today?” Tennant observed that Shakespeare speaks to a “universal human condition.”1 Similar language characterized a range of 2016 promotional materials for celebrations of the four hundredth anniversary of the Bard's death, with descriptors like “lasting legacy,” “relevance,” “timeless,” and “international appeal” recurring. These are, essentially, claims for a universal Shakespeare.
Appeals to Shakespeare's universality are not solely the provenance of late-night repartee or celebratory promotions. Harold Bloom famously argues that Shakespeare is “a more adequate representer of the universe of fact than anyone else.”2 Recently revisiting Shakespeare's universal appeal, Kiernan Ryan contends that problems with universality lie with “the conservative construction,”3 which fails to account for Shakespeare's use “to make class society, patriarchy, racial divisions and colonial domination vanish behind the smokescreen of the eternal human predicament his drama allegedly reflects.”4 Instead, Ryan calls for attention to what he terms Shakespeare's “universal human potential … the potential of human beings, then and now, to base their lives together on values that possess universal validity, because they are founded on the simple, irrefutable fact that we belong to the same species.”5
Yet others remind us to be wary about universalizing claims. Ayanna Thompson analyzes the films Suture and Bringing Down the House, which she maintains depict differing visions of Shakespearean universality based on color-blindness to cultural differences and on an “exclusive and excluding white culture” that eliminates “other cultural productions.”6 Both versions are “not only suspect but also dangerous.”7 More recently, Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall stress the challenge of “considering the vulnerabilities and limitations that universality glosses over,” such as “the prospect that Shakespeare's work cannot always adequately address current issues of racism and racial justice.”8 Assertions of universality thus gloss over Shakespeare as an alienating entity – a shibboleth for approved “high” culture often imagined as white.
In this critical vein, during the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Barack Obama complicated Shakespeare's universality. Recently returned from London, Obama remarked, “I did have lunch with Her Majesty the Queen,...