Nation vs. world? Global imprints on Shakespeare and the orientation of world literature

Abstract

One of the foremost critics in recent decades, Harold Bloom, has asserted that “Shakespeare is to the world’s literature what Hamlet is to the imaginary domain of literary character: a spirit that permeates everywhere, that cannot be confined”, also calling him “the center of the embryo of a world canon, not Western or Eastern” (1994, 52, 62–63). Is this “world’s literature” that which others call world literature? In major discussions of the latter, Shakespeare is mentioned only occasionally and briefly, as if his work and status do not lend themselves to the agenda of such concepts; his prominence in the “world’s literature” does not transfer to world literature. Is this just a play on words? Or is there an underlying epistemological problem owing to which world literature is, for some reason, hardly concerned with Shakespeare? * Another approach to the world/Shakespeare nexus declares him to be an “omnipresence worldwide”: he is able to “transcend any barrier or class, language, colour or creed”, perhaps a symbol of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquid modernity” with the “fluid, ideas-based economy of the global web”, or “a ‘rhizomatic’ figure – decentered, uncontainable, his roots erupting from many different locations simultaneously” (Dickson 2016). Uncontainable, unconfinable: a dialectic appears to operate between the imprint of Shakespeare on the world and the reverse. It is traceable, too, in the “MIT Global Shakespeare Project”, which likewise uses world terminology when it offers information about “international performances that are varying how we understand Shakespeare’s plays and the world” (emphasis added). Globe and world are often treated as near-synonyms, apparent in the way “global Shakespeare” is explained by his presence in “many world cultures” (Dickson 2016). Yet The Oxford English Dictionary defines world prominently as “[t]he state or realm of human existence on earth” (I.1.a.), with a temporal dimension (5.b.); globe is “[a] spherical representation of the earth” (I.2.) (http://www.oed.com; see also Cheah 2014, 307–308). Accordingly, a geographically global or international Shakespeare is not coterminous with his position vis-à-vis world literature. Does that matter? I will