Shakespeare as the Ultimate Form of Cultural Success, Individual Healing, and Personal Development

This chapter considers to what extent Shakespeare has become the embodiment of literary tradition and a sign of the ‘ultimate form of literary achievement’. It considers how Shakespeare’s works are often negotiated via his ‘virtual cultural presence’. Through widespread notoriety Shakespeare’s work is attributed to have an ‘idiomatic sense of cultural success and widespread notoriety. This is connected to how the value of Shakespeare’s work has been sustained and transmitted over time. Shakespeare is believed to be assigned with ‘conventional value’ and is deemed as ‘essential to the progress of this civilisation’. Therefore, the chapter explores how Shakespeare’s work is helpful in promoting values of an idealised civilisation, which can perpetuate the ‘snobbery that to be clever or important or accepted you have to know some Shakespeare’.