[Ryan] argues powerfully against the 'arid antiquarianism' of historicist scholarship, and offers instead a Shakespeare always out of sync with his own time and thus able to transcend it ... [A] highly readable book.
Around the Globe
[This] cogent and passionate appropriation of “the idea of Shakespeare’s timeless universality” is a critical tour de force that draws on concepts that have long animated Ryan’s work ... [A] riveting, beautifully argued, and important book.
Renaissance Quarterly
This daring book is a recent addition to the Bloomsbury/Arden series, Shakespeare NOW! … [which] strives to capture the “excitement, audacity and surprise” of Shakespeare with short books that are “imaginative and provocative.” Kiernan Ryan’s Shakespeare’s Universality is both of these. Ryan works diligently to redeem Shakespeare’s universality from conservative essentialism and recast it in the light of visionary egalitarian change. This egalitarian vision, Ryan contends, makes the plays genuinely universal. Ryan’s premise is that Shakespeare’s plays reveal his “profound commitment” to the “potential of all human beings to live according to principles of freedom, equality and justice”.
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
This is a provocative and fascinating “brief polemic” (p. xvi) whose lean and agile argument addresses the difficult topic of why and in what ways Shakespeare has maintained such a wide and universal appeal through a period of some four hundred years.
Memoria di Shakespeare