Drama is marked and inspired by the specific social forces at work during its creation, and many plays, while popular and appreciated at the time of their writing, have become antiquated and irrelevant for later audiences. William Shakespeare is a remarkable exception. His plays, despite their arcane language and complex plots, continue to provide a rich tapestry for actors, directors, and audiences, whether presented in traditional productions or vigorously recycled, on which to project modern sensibilities. The characters and themes he chose for his plays, along with much of the poetic language with which he endowed his writings, have remained relevant for more than 400 years. Each succeeding generation has used Shakespeare's writing as a way of better understanding its own challenges. While a modern audience can never hope to experience the Shakespearean canon in its original state, the plays provide a framework for contemporary experiences and insights. Issues and events the playwright could not have foreseen influence the ways in which each new age perceives the plays. Shakespeare's art exists in the fact that successive audiences are each able to find their own understandings of the world in his work.
Charles Marowitz observes, "In some ways, one's view of Shakespeare is analogous to one's view of art in general." He describes Shakespeare's writing as a prism, reflecting back the viewer's own image, rather than a set of concrete, unchanging truths to be discovered by each succeeding generation. Kenneth Muir writes, "Stanislavsky declared that when an actor speaks Hamlet's soliloquy, 'To be or not to be,' he puts into the lines much of his own conception of life." The play becomes the thing wherein the actor's conscience, as much as that of the playwright, is caught and revealed.
Certainly, Shakespeare has been seen very differently by many of the ages that followed his. F. E. Halliday charts some of the cy...