The argument of Shakespeare’s entire dramatic project, if there is one, is that we should use the past to think about the present, avoiding both elitist antiquarianism on the one side and hollow polemicism on the other. The greatest energy in Shakespeare studies right now is devoted to historicizing presentized Shakespeare. We need a historicism of Shakespearean presentism.

Chapter One features interviews with Shakespeareans—scholars and theater makers—who do public-facing work, framed by thoughts about how the public is represented in Shakespeare’s plays, how early-modern theater was a form of “public engagement,” how Shakespeare became less public, and efforts to reverse that trend. Set on shifting backdrops of the early-modern theater scene, the rise of periodicals during the industrial revolution, the rise of social media during the digital age, and the adjunctification of higher education in the twenty-first century, this chapter aims to collect interviews with historians of Public Shakespeare like Jeffrey Doty, Chris Fitter, Sujata Iyengar, Louise Geddes, and Uttara Natarajan; with established practitioners like Jonathan Bate, Stephen Greenblatt, Emma Smith, Ayanna Thompson, and Austin Tichenor; and with the next generation, including Brandi K. Adams, Alicia Andrejewski, David Sterling Brown, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Ruben Espinosa, Rebecca L. Fall, Kathryn Vomero Santos, and Geoffrey Way. Interviews historicize the rise of institutional programs such as the Public Shakespeare Initiative, the Folger Library’s Shakespeare and Beyond, Shakespeare Magazine, and The Sundial. Special attention is given to the rise of #ShakeRace, the Twiter hashtag curated by Kim F. Hall, and #PublicShax, created by Fall. The goal is to tell the story of how Shakespeare’s plays started out as a venue of intellectual thought for all citizens of his age, and how that space is being recreated in ours, even—especially—when we’re speaking back to Shakespeare and the bardolatrous powers that hold him up for worship.