When did Shakespeare become Shakespeare, the bard of Avon and the national poet? One possible answer is in 1741, when his statue was put up in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Another is September 1769, when the most famous actor of his age, David Garrick, decided to hold a Shakespeare jubilee.

As Andrew Stott shows in his highly entertaining book, Garrick organised this event in Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate Shakespeare, but also to boost his own flagging career as an actor. In his prime, Garrick had played Hamlet in a special wig with wires in it that could make his hair stand on end when he saw his father’s ghost. He had wowed the nation with the energy and naturalness of his performances. By 1769 he was 52 and “battered by illness and public barbs”. The jubilee was intended to link Garrick’s fame for ever to that of Shakespeare, and to cement Shakespeare’s position as the great English poet, who wrote with a freedom and naturalness that instantly set him apart from the staid regularity of French drama.

Garrick planned a three-day event. It was supposed to include two balls, two public breakfasts, a horse race and a pageant of Shakespearean characters parading through the town. A grand rotunda (based on the one at the fashionable Ranelagh Gardens in London) was erected beside the Avon, a bit like an oversized hexagonal garden shed, but it didn’t matter. Fashionable Londoners bought tickets at a guinea a shot to enter and hear Garrick declaim an ode he had written in honour of Shakespeare. This was to be the climax of the jubilee, and marked Garrick’s presentation of a statue of the bard to the citizens of Stratford. A 327lb sea-turtle was prepared for dinner. Fireworks were arranged for the grand finale. It was supposed to be a blast.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Garrick in the title role of Richard III, by William Hogarth. Photograph: Dea Picture Library/De Agostini/Getty Images

But it didn’t go well. Anyone who has been to an English Heritage re-enactment will find a lot that’s familiar in Stott’s sharp-eyed and funny account of the jubilee. The traffic was dreadful: the roads to Stratford were jammed with carriages. Individual travellers suffered minor disasters; James Boswell, the future biographer of Samuel Johnson, who scented a chance to make his mark as a man of mode, left his money on a coach and had to go back to Woodstock to get it, and so missed the official opening.

But worst of all, the jubilee – in all respects the archetype and origin of English bank-holiday fiestas – was a washout. The gods decided to rain so heavily on Shakespeare’s parade that the parade of Shakespearean characters had to be cancelled. The rotunda leaked, then flooded, then started to float away. The fireworks fizzled miserably. The fashionable Londoners (Boswell had dressed as a Corsican freedom fighter for the climactic masked ball) had to escape on makeshift boardwalks. Stott’s book is a glorious study of the mother of all heritage events, and it’s an excellent reminder of why they should be avoided like the plague.

Despite all this, the jubilee worked out well for Garrick, who cleared a tidy profit. So did the waiters at the ball, who seem to have trousered many of the charges imposed on ticket-holders for extras such as turtle stew. It didn’t work out too badly for Shakespeare either, since the event effectively enshrined him as the national bard, who, in the words of Garrick’s ode,was “the god of our idolatry” and “Nature’s glory, Fancy’s child”. Garrick’s Shakespeare prepared the way for Romantic Shakespeare, the man of high feeling and noble sentiments, the master of imagination, the poet whose human wisdom surpassed that of all other dramatists.

Is this Shakespeare? Well, for pretty much 200 years it was. But as Emma Smith argues, “Shakespeare wasn’t always ‘Shakespeare’ ... bundled up with English national identity” and set as a school text. This Is Shakespeare sets out a modern alternative to Garrick’s playwright. Each of its chapters on 20 individual plays is like the best kind of thought-provoking programme note. There are perky one liners about individual plays: of King Lear “In ancient Britain, life’s a bitch (not to mention your daughters), and then you die”. Henry IV, Part 1 is “a history play that would prefer not to be”. Macbeth “asks why things happen: that we still can’t answer is key to its unsettling hold on our imagination”. Measure for Measure has a “#MeToo plot”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Measure for Measure at the Globe in 2015.

But for all its streetwise wording the book is grounded in deep thinking about staging, about Shakespeare’s texts and about how the canon – which Smith discusses in chronological order – connects together. She shows how he twisted up tragedy and comedy, experimented with genders, dramatised racial difference and responded to changes in his company and in the tastes of his rulers. She does it all with such a light touch you barely notice how much you’re learning.

Her main argument is pretty uncontentious: that Shakespeare’s plays raise questions rather than answering them, and that his kind of genius was a genius of what she calls “gappiness”. This is more or less what Keats called “negative capability”, or the ability to suggest things without saying them. It means that we can “make Shakespeare mean what we want him to mean”, and reinterpret him in each age.

This doesn’t license Smith to say whatever she likes, though, since her Shakespeare is partly a figure of his own age, who is interested (like most late Elizabethans) in political succession and the grittier aspects of the patriarchal family. But she often zooms in on understated details in the plays that allow audiences and directors to see in them other, more contemporary, concerns. So at the end of Measure for Measure, Isabella, who wants to be a nun and has been sexually bullied by the ill-named Angelo, is asked by the Duke to marry him. She says nothing. Smith sees this as a focus for the gender and genre politics of the play: how badly do you want a comedy and a conventional happy ending? Enough to force a woman to marry? At the end of Twelfth Night Antonio – who is the friend of Viola’s brother Sebastian – is also on stage and yet silent. This is for Smith a reminder that the price of romantic comedy – boy meets and marries girl – is that boys who marry have to set aside homosocial, and potentially homoerotic, relationships between men. Shakespeare can make silence speak.

Sometimes her Shakespeare is darkened by Freudian horrors that would probably have made Garrick’s mechanical wig lift right off his head. A Midsummer Night’s Dream “isn’t really a play for children” as it provides sexual options “from bestiality to pederasty, from wife-swapping to sexual masochism”. And maybe sometimes this can go a bit too far. A Midsummer Night’s Dream does (like many dreams) have a dark side, but it’s also interested (as many of Shakespeare’s works are) in the imagination and the magic of language, which can transform how people see the world. Smith tends to foreground sexual politics over such things. This might make some readers feel nostalgia – not for the full soggy bardolatrous horrors of Garrick’s jubilee, but for the ghost of the Romantic Shakespeare, the verbal master and genius of imagination. Because as well as asking deep and unsettling questions of his audience Shakespeare made a living out of being eloquent and fun.

But Smith – who is certainly no enemy of fun: her book fizzes with jokes – is celebrating a Shakespeare who talks to the present. And it is moral and political issues rather than aesthetics or wordplay that tend to set people’s pulses racing today. Her Shakespeare is “permissive, modern, challenging, gappy, frustrating, moving”. Those who flocked to Garrick’s jubilee mostly wanted to see or be seen. Their modern equivalents, who sit through traffic jams in the rain on the M40 on their way to Stratford, ought to be making their pilgrimage to see the challenging and questioning playwright evoked by Smith. And anyone who doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about should read This Is Shakespeare.

• Colin Burrow’s Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity is published this month by Oxford. What Blest Genius? The Jubilee That Made Shakespeare is published by WW Norton (£16.99). This Is Shakespeare is published by Pelican (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.