The thesis of Harvard professor Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare and Modern Culture is a chiastic one: “Shakespeare makes modern culture; modern culture makes Shakespeare.” Chiasmus, as Garber explains, is Greek for crosswise placing, a trope that reverses the order in adjacent phrases. Thus, for example, Hamlet’s “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?” Garber expatiates: “The doubling effect is a doubling back that also becomes a doubletake.” The book asserts that much of our thinking, saying, and doing can be traced to Shakespeare, while, reciprocally and chiastically, our age, like all others, creates a Shakespeare in its own image of him. This strikes me as verging on the obvious, but worth an essay, if not an entire book.

In her magnum opus, the thousand-page Shakespeare After All (2004), Garber offered critical discussions of all Shakespeare’s plays; now she has chosen ten for further examination. For each play she has a “keyword,” which represents its epitome—a consciousness-coloring bequest to posterity that posterity periodically reinterprets, and so creates the Shakespeare of the moment. Does this idea require 350 pages?

Reciprocally and chiastically, our age, like all others, creates a Shakespeare in its own image of him.

Yes, it does, since it is also Garber’s object to display her polymathy, her knowledge of many areas of both high and low, or popular, culture. Thus she segues easefully from a New Yorker cartoon (high culture) to a New York Postarticle (low culture). In her long Introduction alone,