He explored, rather than argued about, themes.

The argument

One needs only spend a few minutes in an academic database looking up Shakespeare criticism to realize the diverse range of themes Shakespeare addressed, and the complexity of the conclusions that thousands of critics have been able to draw from how he treated them. Often within a single work, Shakespeare offers an astounding number of explorations on a single theme. For example, King Lear shows numerous views of distorted families. There are the ungrateful daughters of Lear, the bastard child Edmund, and more. The entire work ends in tragedy, so how can we discern who acted best? What form of family could have stopped the tragedy? That we will never know for sure shows Shakespeare's genius. Shakespeare's interest and capability in investigating all the complexities of life places him as a universal author. His work reflects the reality of life.

Premises

Counter-arguments

That a database yields thousands of critical studies, and that King Lear's questions can never be finally settled, shows Shakespeare is richly interpretable and heavily studied — not that he is 'universal and timeless'. An author can generate endless scholarship while remaining culturally and historically specific: much of that criticism exists precisely because Shakespeare occupies an entrenched place at the centre of the English literary canon, which channels scholarly attention his way, so the volume of writing partly measures institutional prestige rather than intrinsic universality. The reasoning is close to circular — his canonical status drives the criticism, and the criticism is then offered as proof of the status. Open-endedness, likewise, is a feature of a great many works; that a play resists a single moral conclusion demonstrates that it is ambiguous and interpretable, qualities shared by countless texts across traditions, not that it speaks to all people in all times. Universality would need evidence that audiences across genuinely different cultures and eras find the same resonance, which the abundance of Anglophone academic criticism does not by itself supply.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The volume of criticism partly reflects Shakespeare's entrenched place in the academic canon, which directs scholarly attention toward him; it is a measure of institutional prestige as much as of universality. [Rejecting P3] That a work's questions can never be settled shows it is open to interpretation — true of many texts — which is not the same as being universal or timeless.