This chapter returns to the theoretical discussions about presentism by Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes to reconsider two concepts that continue to be used in describing the presence of the past in the present: universality and authenticity. This reconsideration is illustrated by two examples that took place less than 2 weeks apart in October 2016—namely, the attribution of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan and the early departure of Emma Rice from her role as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe. Making use of Theodor Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity (1964), I argue that, if presentism wishes to be more than a repetition of Jan Kott’s famous phrase, ‘Shakespeare, our contemporary’, its account of the dialectic between past and present needs to think in terms of constellations of particularity and contingency rather than universality or authenticity. It would therefore need to consider the presence of the past in the present in a way that neither erases the historical difference of each, nor devalues this difference as an imperfection that, like King Hamlet’s fullness of bread, would need to be purged.