Thinking Beyond Shakespeare – A Fellow Perspective: David Womersley

Shakespeare continues to speak across centuries, not simply through plot or poetry, but through enduring questions about identity, politics, morality and what it means to be human. In this month’s Fellow Perspective, St Catherine’s Fellow, Professor David Womersley reflects on his new book, Thinking Through Shakespeare, the lasting power of literature, and why curiosity and intellectual openness still matter.

For many scholars, books begin with years of accumulated research or a long-held academic fascination. For David, Thinking Through Shakespeare began, in part, with theatre.While living in Munich during 2018-19, David and his wife became regular attendees at productions by The New Theatre, an international company founded by director Paul Stebbings. “Paul told me that any audience would connect somehow with Shakespeare,” David explains. “But that the work of other playwrights often fell flat. It seemed to me that this was something worth thinking about, and trying to explain.”

That question, why Shakespeare still resonates so powerfully, became the foundation for his new book. Rather than approaching Shakespeare solely as a literary figure, Thinking Through Shakespeare explores how the plays grapple with profound and unresolved human questions. For David, Shakespeare’s enduring appeal lies partly in his refusal to become trapped by certainty. “Most authors are imprisoned within their opinions,” he says. “Shakespeare, however, seems to have been able to entertain ideas without being permanently captured by them.”

That intellectual openness, he suggests, is central to Shakespeare’s longevity. “He had an astonishing acuteness in constructing plays that pivot around aspects of human nature and society of enduring pertinence.”

David organises the book around four broad themes: personal identity; the relationship between barbarism and civilisation; the interplay between political and religious authority; and competing ideas of moral action. “These are questions concerning which it is impossible honestly to be of only one mind,” he reflects. “Hence they are intrinsically dramatic.”

The writing process itself also brought moments of excitement and discovery. David recalls becoming particularly absorbed by Timon of Athens and The Tempest, two late plays which, in his reading, almost mirror one another. “Timon is a Rousseauvian satire on civil society,” he explains, “while The Tempest asserts the need for moral sentiment along the lines later explored by Adam Smith.”

What fascinates him most is Shakespeare’s remarkable imaginative range. “The extraordinary plasticity of Shakespeare’s moral and dramatic imagination I find endlessly fascinating.” That flexibility, David believes, speaks to a broader role for literature and the humanities in contemporary life. In an age shaped increasingly by technology, rapid information and political division, he argues that literary scholarship remains far from peripheral. “The arts and humanities guide us concerning how to benefit fully from the extraordinary boons provided by science and technology,” he says. “And they also warn us concerning the misuse of those boons.”

Art alone may not solve society’s problems, but it performs another vital function. “The arts by themselves don’t solve problems. But they do make problems visible and intelligible.” That ability to illuminate complexity rather than flatten it feels especially relevant within Oxford’s collegiate environment, something David sees reflected in St Catz itself. “Colleges need to be both open and closed,” he says. The architecture of Oxford, he suggests, embodies this tension. “Colleges must be open to innovation, but equally they must test what is offered to us as the new, and not carelessly throw away the old and tried.” For David, the College motto captures this balance perfectly. “Nova et Vetera expresses the difficult balance that is required.”

Alongside academic life and College commitments, writing remains a deeply rewarding part of his work. “I very much enjoy the process of writing,” he says. “It can be hard to get the first draft done, but after that I look forward to the polishing and refining.” Often, he finds, stepping away can be as important as sustained concentration. “It is only then that what you are really saying becomes clear, even to you.”

And there is little sign of slowing down. David already has two further books at advanced stages, one examining the seventeenth-century republican Henry Neville and the political possibilities of print culture, and another titled Tender Swift, exploring Jonathan Swift’s sharp satirical treatment of civility and refinement. Beyond that, another ambitious project waits in the wings. “I hope,” he says, “to write an intellectual biography of the historian Edward Gibbon.”

For readers of Thinking Through Shakespeare, that continuing curiosity feels entirely fitting. After all, as David’s work reminds us, the most enduring questions are rarely those with simple answers.

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Find out more about Professor Womersley’s research, here.