Review of Shakespeare and Modern Culture by Marjorie Garber

In Shakespeare and Modern Culture, Marjorie Garber makes a bold, provocative claim: not only do we read Shakespeare, but Shakespeare reads us. Far from a relic of the past, Shakespeare’s works, Garber argues, have created many of the very ideas we associate with modernity—interiority, ambition, authenticity, and even irony itself.

This is not a book about Shakespeare's influence in the narrow literary sense. It is about Shakespeare as a cultural engine—one whose plays have shaped, and continue to shape, how we understand human behavior, politics, and identity. “Shakespeare makes modern culture,” Garber writes, “and modern culture makes Shakespeare.” This feedback loop—dynamic, recursive, and often unconscious—is the driving force behind her argument.

Garber moves deftly through plays like Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, pairing them with cultural touchstones as diverse as Freud, Lincoln, and postmodern theory.

Each chapter centers on a theme—mourning, money, or the uncanny—and shows how Shakespeare’s language seeded these concepts into the cultural imagination. For example, Hamlet is not merely a study in grief; it is the origin point for our modern conception of psychological complexity.

One of the most compelling threads is Garber’s attention to how Shakespeare’s phrases, characters, and situations have become conceptual tools. From Lady Macbeth’s guilt to Shylock’s demand for justice, we return to Shakespeare to name experiences, justify positions, and perform identity. “Shakespeare,” she argues, “is not timeless; he is timely over and over again.”

Garber’s prose is characteristically rich and allusive, sometimes veering into the abstract, but always grounded by an infectious curiosity. Rather than simplifying Shakespeare for the modern reader, she invites the reader to dwell in ambiguity and contradiction—just as the plays do.

Verdict:
Shakespeare and Modern Culture is not a conventional work of literary criticism. It is a sweeping cultural study that repositions Shakespeare not as a monument to be revered, but as a force still shaping how we think and live. For readers willing to engage deeply, it offers dazzling insights into why Shakespeare remains uncannily contemporary.