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What we call `unique' or `authentic' in Shakespeare, the genuine article, is really no more than his extraordinary ability to parody himself. Shakespeare is continually serving up uncannily accurate Shakespearean parodies, many of them so lifelike as to be positively startling . . . . His utter uniqueness, his quintessential identity, lies in the fact that he never gives us anything we have not in some sense heard before. In this way Shakespeaere is the quintessential commodity, eternally the same, a magnificent feat of self-identity persisting through the most bizarre diversions and variations. He Shakespeareanizes everything, as the commodity converts difference to the homogeneous; and just as the commodity emits, along with its use-value, a kind of lateral, silent message (`I am wealth, power, status'), so it is impossible to read or watch Shakespeare without hearing, in the very thick of the `human life' of the drama, that insistent subliminal message: `I am Shakespeare' . . . . Shakespeare's unique distinctiveness lies in his instant recognisability: we have always-already known his voice, this style, and it is to our own always pre-given recognition that we are listening. The aura, it would appear, can survive a thousand mechanical reproductions.
---Terry Eagleton, "Afterword" to The Shakespeare Myth (1988) |