Modernity, modernism and postmodernism in the twentieth-century’s Shakespeare

The impulses which brought about the new aesthetic movement of modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century were often iconoclastic and violent. The 1910 Futurist Manifesto, for example, exhorted its readers as follows:

Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers, and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly. Come on, set fire to the library shelves. Turn aside the canals to flood the museums. . . . So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers. . . . Here we are! Here we are!