Every epoch reinvents its Shakespeare

00:41:06 — Every epoch reinvents its Shakespeare

The canonical example: Shakespeare’s greatness is not some timeless nucleus sitting beneath successive readings, but exactly the opposite — the capacity of the work to be legitimately re-constituted from each epoch’s position. Hamlet, Žižek says earlier in the conversation, is not a stable object we approach with better or worse tools; it is a text whose ontological incompleteness is what makes the romantic, modernist and contemporary Shakespeares each in their own right a real Shakespeare.