How is Shakespeare still relevant to a modern audience?

Shakespeare's plays remain relevant to us because we still struggle with the same issues that his characters faced. For example, most of us have times, like Hamlet, where, rather than face our problems, we would prefer to disappear (or as he puts it, "dissolve into a dew"). We all also have to confront betrayals, and some of us have to learn to understand that the people close to us may be terrible people and not have our best interests at heart. Most of us, too, like Macbeth, have to struggle with the temptation to take an immoral shortcut to success. This might not involve murdering someone who has been kind and generous to us, but we may be tempted to cheat in some way. Therefore, Macbeth's story can serve as a warning today, just as it could in the past. And who hasn't been—or isn't right now—a teenager falling impulsively in love, as Romeo and Juliet do?

Further, Shakespeare was ahead of his time in understanding gender issues. It is only within the last century that we have come to fully recognize his appreciation for strong women, such as Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare shows, through her and other female protagonists, that women have talents equal to men's.

Many viewers appreciate Shakespeare's fundamental humanity. While appealing to audiences with entertaining stories, he also questions some of the assumptions of his—and our—times. Are feuds, like those between the Capulets and the Montagues, really a good idea, or do they show grown men acting like children? Does revenge make sense, or does it just cause more and more bloodshed, to no avail?

Finally, critics like Rene Girard maintain that Shakespeare's appeal remains constant because he understood that, across civilizations, people want what other people have. Girard calls this a mimesis of desire. For example, he calls the "love potion" that causes both Demtrius and Lysander to fall in love with Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream a decoy: the play is enacting the fact that once one man falls for Helena, the other can't help but follow suit. We enjoy Shakespeare's plays today, Girard would say, because they enact our primal, but hidden, desires.

What is Shakespeare's contemporary relevance in literature and the arts?

Shakespeare's abiding relevance lies in the fact that he deals in such a unique way with universal themes such as love, greed, and the desire for political power. Because these themes are universal, they transcend the time and place in which they were written, speaking to many different people in many different cultures, down through the centuries and right across the globe. And the arts—especially literature—are the primary vehicle for the transmission of such universal themes.

But it's how Shakespeare handles these themes that allows him to speak to us in the present age. Unlike any other artist, Shakespeare, having created his unforgettable characters, stands back and lets them speak—however good, bad, or indifferent they are. There's no finger-wagging with Shakespeare, no telling people what they ought to do or how to live their lives. He simply gives each character, even the incredibly wicked ones, the space in which to tell their own stories. Once he's done that, he leaves it up to us how we should judge them.

In an age where agreement on common standards of morality is increasingly difficult to secure, Shakespeare's morally neutral rendering of his characters and their worlds has much greater salience for a contemporary audience than a more narrowly didactic, rhetorical approach.

What is the relevance of Shakespeare's plays for modern audiences?

One of the reasons that Shakespeare is said to be a writer of "timeless" literature is that his topics and, especially his characters, speak to a modern audience just as forcefully as they did when the Bard was writing. If we look to Shakespeare's characters, we find that some of the men have the best of intentions, but are brought down by the evil of those around them, as seen with Hamlet, the "haunted" prince of Denmark in the play by the same name, and Brutus in Julius Caesar. Hamlet wants to avenge his father's murder while avoiding the forfeiture of his eternal soul (as killing a king—Claudius—was considered at the time to be a mortal sin). Brutus' part in the assassination of Caesar can be seen as an act of treason, but begged the question of the Elizabethan audience as to whether it was lawful to depose or kill a king (or queen) if that person was a danger to the state. It was for this reason that Brutus joins Cassius—Brutus fears what Caesar will do to Rome if he is declared "king," while Cassius is simply jealous and resentful toward Caesar, wanting him dead simply for Cassius' personal gratification. Brutus sacrifices everything for the noble purpose of protecting Rome, which he loves more than his own life.

Our society is not without its villains, and we can see such in the person of Macbeth, who kills his king to become the ruler of Scotland. Shakespeare describes tyrants other than Macbeth: King Lear who is a tyrannical father; and, Duke Frederick who grasps at the reins of power by usurping his own brother and exiling him. (There are many more examples in Shakespeare's "historical" plays.)

Shakespeare's women provide a colorful tapestry of characters we can identify with: Lady Macbeth is a schemer and willing partner in her husband's murder of Duncan; Gertrude marries her brother-in-law, committing incest (as the Elizabethans saw it) after her husband, Old Hamlet, dies—she is a women trying to survive in a man's world; Ophelia, Hamlet's sweetheart, is destroyed by the machinations of this man's world, losing her mind as she is toyed with and heartbroken; she drowns and the men around her (especially the Church) insist she committed suicide when a branch she sat on broke and she fell into the water. We are mesmerized by the Weird Sisters in Macbeth who play with Macbeth's mind and induce him to sacrifice his soul to be king; and we are further haunted by the witches' queen, Hecate, who wants nothing more than to destroy Macbeth motivated by pure evil. The audience sees innocence destroyed by the fighting of families in Romeo and Juliet.

Even in the face of tragedy and violence, Shakespeare also speaks to common foolishness that abounds when we don't pay attention, try to manipulate those around us, or simply lose sight of what is important. These things serve to entertain us when the comedy of human error is displayed in plays such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Taming of the Shrew.

Shakespeare's characters, and the themes that drive the plots, are rife with examples of the evil of some, the foolishness of others, and those lucky enough to recognize their mistakes before it is too late. We can identify with Shakespeare because the people he described beginning in the late 1400s, are much like those we see in the news and in our neighborhoods. The beauty of his writing allows us to further see the genius of the man, and his plays are still performed to appreciative audiences today.