Shakespeare Inc.

20 minute read
JUMANA FAROUKY / Stratford-Upon-Avon

When two actors, Henry Condell and John Heminges, started putting together a book of all their friend’s plays, they could not have guessed where it would lead. But they did know publishing was an expensive and risky business — if their labor of love wasn’t going to end in financial disaster, it had to sell. By the time he died in 1616, William Shakespeare was already a popular playwright and well-known actor in England. So when Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies hit the shelves seven years later, the title page carried the author’s name in big letters. Underneath it was a portrait that would have been familiar to anyone who had seen Will on stage — the 17th century equivalent of putting Paul Newman’s face on a bottle of salad dressing. Half of Shakespeare’s plays had already appeared in print, and there were a few that Condell and Heminges either chose not to or couldn’t include; but to assure readers that they were still buying something special, the price for the collection, known today as the First Folio, was set at a steep 20 shillings, the cost of over 100 loaves of bread. “The fate of all bookes depends upon your capacities, and not of your heads alone, but of your purses,” the editors wrote in their introduction. “Whatever you do, buy.”

Even back then, Shakespeare’s value as an artist was tied to his worth at the till. Not that it was a hard sell; he was pretty handy with a quill. From Macbeth’s tortured soul to Much Ado About Nothing’s romantic antics, he had the uncanny ability to put into words what it means to be human. “More than any other writer, he can teach us enormously about ourselves,” says American Shakespeare critic Harold Bloom. “He has this almost miraculous ability to keep inventing language, to think more deeply, and more capaciously, than any philosophical mind and to show us how far thinking can go.”

But without that weighty tome published by his two friends, Shakespeare might never have gone from local boy made good to global literary icon. “If you believe that Shakespeare’s words have survived because they were written by a great poet and playwright, you’re wrong,” says Gary Taylor, English scholar at Florida State University and co-editor of the Oxford University Press’s authoritative edition of Shakespeare’s complete works (see Viewpoint). “His words have survived because someone put them into pieces of type, set those into forms, pressed those inked forms into sheets of paper and sewed those sheets together in a particular order.” And because someone else bought them.

That relationship between culture and cash has followed Shakespeare ever since. Now he’s a trusted brand, the center of a global industry that reaches into everything from education to the economy — and from the State to The Simpsons. When, in 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked if the failure to find Osama bin Laden made the U.S. look inept, he misquoted Hamlet: “Something’s neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so, I suppose, as Shakespeare said.” The Simpsons’ manglings of the Bard have been deliberate — “Much Apu About Nothing,” in which the Kwik-E-Mart clerk faces deportation, and “Dial Z for Zombies,” featuring a fight with the undead Bard. This year Shakespeare will be a major presence onstage — Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company (rsc) launches a yearlong festival of his work in April — and on the screen, with the summer release of a Hollywood adaptation of As You Like It. Meanwhile, eminent scholar Jonathan Bate is putting together a new collection of the plays based purely on the First Folio, the book that started it all. When it comes to the Bard, supply is endless and demand is high.

Shakespeare never saw that kind of adoration while he was alive. Back then he was the pop-culture king, the Elizabethan James Cameron — entertaining, yes, but you wouldn’t really take him seriously. It was not until 100 years after he died that he started getting some respect. By the 18th century, Britain was established as a military power and wanted to show it had brains to go with the brawn. “There was a strong sense that if Britain was a great modern state, as Rome was in ancient times, it must have a canon of classic British literature, as the Romans had their Horace, Ovid and Virgil,” says Bate. “As part of establishing high culture in Britain, Shakespeare became the national poet.” Now, he’s a symbol of artistry, intelligence and wisdom. His work is recommended reading for schoolkids all over the world. In 1988, Britain introduced a national curriculum that doesn’t prescribe any specific author or text � except Shakespeare.

Before they even understand why, kids are taught that Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time. Most of them grow up to be adults who still believe it — and who buy books. The market for Shakespeare books is too huge to measure, but in 2004, there were around 125 books by or about the Bard published in Britain alone.

It was books, tucked under the arms of England’s traveling nobles and gift-bearing emissaries during the 17th century, that helped turn the Shakespeare industry into a global enterprise. Shakespeare’s plays are now translated into over 70 languages including Klingon (in the fictional language from Star Trek, Hamlet’s famous speech opens with “taH pagh taHbe”). “Even a bad translation conveys the sense that he’s great,” says Jean-Michel Déprats, editor of Shakespeare’s complete works for France’s La Pléiade Library editions and translator of more than 30 of his plays. “The extreme brevity of Shakespeare’s language is problematic. Like his use of monosyllables, which are bound to be longer in [some languages]. The difficulty is trying not to lose what’s important. For me, it’s the rhythm, the performability, the physicality of the language.”

Translation demands interpretation, which leaves behind cultural fingerprints. Every time Shakespeare’s texts are morphed into another tongue, they become as much a product of that nation as they are of the author himself. Granted honorary citizenship, he’s elbowed his way alongside literary heavyweights like Germany’s Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Russia’s Leo Tolstoy and France’s Voltaire, becoming the international favorite. In Russia, for example, Hamlet is performed more than any other play. “Hardly any other country ever knew such veneration of a play, or of a playwright,” says Alexey Bartoshevitch, distinguished Shakespeare scholar and professor at the Moscow-based Russian Academy of Theater Arts. “At some point, Shakespeare ceased to be perceived as a phenomenon of a foreign-language culture and emerged as one of Russian psyche and Russian art. In different times, different Shakespeare plays come forth. Now, they turn to The Merchant of Venice to muse on xenophobia, something dangerous and deeply rooted both in mankind and Russian culture. In the 1960s, everybody understood that Richard III was about the Stalinist terror. Now, the play finds a new angle — directors look at the roots of Richard’s complexes of ugliness, deformity and loneliness that have made him such a depraved, sadistic, horrible creature. It’s an attempt to explain rather than forgive.”

To Thine Own Will Be True
For as long as people have been reading Shakespeare, there have been people writing about reading Shakespeare. In the 20th century, Shakespeare criticism took off, fueled by the emergence of new schools of literary theory and spawning a whole new minimarket in publishing. Scholars and critics broke up into camps, each espousing its own way of understanding the Bard. These days, rivalries between them can play out like one of his epic tragedies. Feminists, looking at the plays from a woman’s point of view, clash with Freudians and their Oedipal obsessions; Marxist critics wield their political theories against Christian critics and their Biblical ones. Most recently, the New Historicists — who, led by their founding father, U.S. scholar Stephen Greenblatt, read Shakespeare’s plays in historical context — have come up against the most well-known (and vocal) critic of them all. That would be Bloom. He believes literature should be read on purely aesthetic terms, removed from history or politics, and calls New Historicism “[Michel] Foucault and soda water.”

All this bickering might help nudge up sales, but the big business is in biographies. “Most academics want to write about Shakespeare’s plays,” says Greenblatt. “The paradox is that most nonacademics want to read about Shakespeare’s life.” In 2004, Greenblatt’s Will in the World came out to critical acclaim and went on to become a best seller. In the past few years, biographies like Frank Kermode’s The Age of Shakespeare, Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography and James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare have all sold well on the promise of trying to reveal what made Shakespeare tick. “If you think of the plays as letters that had been sent to you by a dead person who somehow knew your name, you’d want to know who that person was,” says Greenblatt.

And for every Shakespeare play, there’s a guide like CliffsNotes to explain it. There are self-help books: What Would Shakespeare Do? uses his quotes to answer life’s big questions, like whether or not to wear sunscreen (he says yes); and cookbooks: Shakespeare’s Kitchen is filled with recipes for meals he may have eaten. Books of his insults, his jokes, Shakespeare for children, Shakespeare for Dummies, detective novels based on his plays, erotic novels based on his life. If Shakespeare stares out from the cover of a book, someone somewhere will buy it.

But the Shakespeare industry stretches far beyond the walls of the local bookstore. His image and reputation are used to sell everything from the obvious (theater tickets, tour guides) to the obscure (novelty underwear, board games — in The Bard Game, the players are theater owners trying to put on the winning production). He can even sell you a state of mind. Richard Olivier, for one, teaches people to use Shakespeare in the office. Most people look at Henry V and see a king trying to unite England and France, but Olivier — son of the legendary Sir Laurence — sees a ceo trying to merge two of his company’s divisions. After 15 years as a theater director, Olivier noticed an unlikely parallel between the issues Shakespeare deals with in his plays and the problems people face in the workplace. Now he heads up Olivier Mythodrama, an organization that uses Shakespeare to teach company managers how to lead their staff. “Our notion is that all good leaders need to be good performers,” he says. “In some of Shakespeare’s plays there are some fabulous role models who show both things that could help you and things that could make you fail disastrously.”

Britain’s Cabinet Office and companies such as DaimlerChrysler, Nokia and Standard Chartered have all sent managers to pick up a few pointers from Olivier Mythodrama, which draws from one of four plays, depending on the problems each client aims to address. Does a round of redundancies threaten? The Tempest has hints for dealing with change. Want to motivate your employees? Henry V knows how. “Julius Caesar is about how to use politics, power and influence effectively,” Olivier says. “Macbeth shows how to stop overreaching ambition from derailing you. And it’s also about quiet, courageous leadership. Malcolm doesn’t even get the bleedin’ play named after him, but he’s the character who saves the nation.” Olivier also tried developing a course based on Hamlet, but eventually gave up. “It was driving us mad trying to figure out how you could possibly turn a multiple suicide death into a leadership lesson,” he says. “Other than Enron, nothing came to mind.”

Get Thee to a Travel Agent
For centuries, Shakespeare has been one of Britain’s most successful exports. In return, he brings in a steady supply of imports in the shape of holidaying tourists — a lot of them heading for Stratford-upon-Avon. The tiny town where Shakespeare was born, bred and buried is home to 23,000 people, and almost 25% of them work in the tourist trade, dealing with an annual influx of over 700,000 tourists. Visitors come to marvel at the childhood homes of Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway, take in a virtual-reality presentation at Shakespearience, maybe grab a bite at the Food of Love café. And to buy souvenirs. Anyone looking to bring the Bard back home could fill a bag the size of Falstaff’s trousers with everything from fridge magnets to magnifying glasses, letter-writing sets (quill included) to Shakespeare-shaped cookies. Tourists spend around $300 million a year in the town and surrounding area.

Come April 23, Shakespeare’s birthday, that figure is going to get a boost. That’s when the rsc launches its Complete Works Festival, an unprecedented retrospective of all 38 Shakespeare plays and all his poems over the course of a year. With three theaters in Stratford-upon-Avon playing host to fans from all over the world, the rsc expects to sell over 700,000 tickets — ranging from $10 to $75. Hotels and B&Bs will see more business from enthusiasts staying several nights to catch more performances (instead of day-tripping in from larger cities, like they usually do). And most visitors to Stratford-upon-Avon come via London, so the capital will see some of that action, too.

But Britain isn’t the only place that benefits. Cyprus, Egypt, Syria — Shakespeare set many of his plays far beyond his homeland’s borders, and wherever Shakespeare’s imagination went, the tourist dollar follows. It’s doubtful he ever traveled to Denmark, but a globe-trotting friend might have told him about a visit to Kronborg Castle in Elsinore (also known as Helsing�r). He made it Hamlet’s home, and since the 1930s, people have flocked to the rugged sandstone castle to watch plays performed in its courtyard. Italy appears as a setting in at least a dozen Shakespeare plays, including All’s Well That Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet. Italian tour groups take visitors to the cities mentioned in the plays and, in 2003, a theater modeled on the iconic O-shaped, open-air Globe Theatre — which Shakespeare wrote for and acted in when he lived in London — was built in Rome. That’s seven years after the London Globe was reconstructed, itself beaten to the punch by a German Globe replica in Neuss, near Düsseldorf, opened in 1991. “It’s a radical renewal of our stage conventions,” says Neuss Globe actor and director Norbert Kentrup. “We now have the audience as an active, visible recipient. Given that we perform in daylight and can always see the theatergoers, the text will be new to me as an actor with every performance.” And Poland is spending $9.6 million to reconstruct a 17th century theater in Gdansk that was based on the Fortune playhouse (a London theater that competed with the Globe when Will was working there), and staged Shakespeare productions until under communism it was razed to make way for a parking lot.

If these theaters sound like shrines, it’s only fitting for a guy whose work many scholars refer to as quasi-religious texts. There’s even a word for Shakespeare worship: bardolatry. As with any religion, there are the heretics, people who claim Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays. Theories abound as to who did, and an offshoot industry of books, articles and documentaries dissects the “authorship debate.” Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (who was familiar with the details of the Elizabethan Court), Christopher Marlowe (known to dabble with a quill, but would have had to fake his own death in 1593) and Queen Elizabeth I herself are all among the front-runners. Or maybe it was a roomful of monkeys with typewriters. It doesn’t help that little is known about Shakespeare’s life — nobody’s even sure what he looked like. Modern images of Shakespeare are based on six portraits of him, all of them with the familiar receding hairline, small mustache and wide collar, but with slightly different details — one gives him bulging eyes, another a full beard, another an earring. A new exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery claims over three years’ research has revealed that Shakespeare most likely only sat for one of those portraits, the so-called Chandos portrait, while in February a German academic claimed two of them are authentic.

All The World’s a Stage … and Screen
Shakespeare may have turned into a bookseller, a leadership guru, a myth — but he started out as a poet and playwright. And the beating heart of the Shakespeare industry is still the plays he wrote and the performances that come out of them. British scholar Bate is working on a project that he hopes will take Shakespeare back to his roots. In collaboration with the rsc, he’s putting together a new collection of all Shakespeare’s plays that will get closer to 1623’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies than any other. In the past, scholars trying to collate the definitive complete works have taken bits of the First Folio and mixed them together with earlier editions of the 18 Shakespeare plays that had been published during his lifetime. Apart from updating the English and fixing obvious printer’s errors, Bate is sticking to the First Folio. “Shakespeare’s plays were working scripts, and it’s in the nature of theater that plays get changed in the course of rehearsal and revival,” he says. “Other editions were trying to recover something that didn’t exist, namely a single lost original. We are going to recover something that did exist, namely the texts that were authorized by Shakespeare’s fellow actors.” Plus, it comes with more naughty bits: Bate’s book will have an on-page glossary pointing out every double entendre. “Everybody’s always known that Shakespeare uses puns that involve genitals,” he says. “But going through word by word, line by line, we’re seeing that he does it far, far more than anyone’s ever realized.”

As for the plays, the Complete Works Festival is a chance for the rsc to defend its title as the most famous classical ensemble group in theater. Pushing its biggest stars center stage, it’s also inviting theater companies from around the world to give their take on Shakespeare. “It’s a chance for us to rub shoulders with some of the major European ensembles and see what they can teach us,” says Michael Boyd, the rsc’s artistic director. A production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from India, with dialogue in seven languages, mixes elements of Bollywood, street performance and the Western stage. “That’s going to tell us an enormous amount about Shakespeare’s relationship to magic and spirituality.” Russia brings an all-male version of Twelfth Night, Poland’s Song of the Goat Theater goes avant-garde on Macbeth and New York City-based Tiny Ninja Theater will act out Hamlet with plastic ninja figurines. Says Prince Charles, a dedicated supporter of the arts and president of the rsc: “Shakespeare’s art and observation go beyond the cleverness of his words, approaching a collective consciousness … [The festival] will be the perfect opportunity to discover why Shakespeare’s work is as relevant today as it was 400 years ago.”

It’s also an opportunity to catch some of Britain’s most respected thespians treading the boards. Before Judi Dench became James Bond’s revered M, before Ian McKellen donned Gandalf’s gray beard, before Patrick Stewart was trekking stars as Captain Picard, they all made their names as Shakespearean actors. The Bard’s plays are notoriously challenging — marathon speeches, exhausting running times and the gamut of emotions, from despair to joy and back again. There are enough ambitious actors, and enough people willing to watch them try, for Britain to maintain two theater companies to showcase the work. Along with the rsc in Stratford-upon-Avon, there’s a repertory troupe at London’s Globe Theatre. And the National Theatre, on that city’s South Bank, originally proposed as yet another temple to the Bard, still stages his plays a few times a year. “There’s a place in the market for live performance that stirs and shakes us, sat down together, achieving some kind of human consensus about what to do next with our lives,” says Boyd. “And I don’t think anyone’s got that better than Shakespeare.” Each year, around 850,000 people visit the rsc‘s three theaters, generating a turnover of over $50 million.

Onstage, a performance of a Shakespeare play ends when the lights go up. On celluloid, it’s preserved forever. Laurence Olivier’s film version of Henry V (1944) was ground-breaking, and with Hamlet (1948) he became the first actor to direct himself to a best-actor Oscar; while Marlon Brando still thrills as Marc Antony in Julius Caesar (1953). More than 600 films based on Shakespeare’s work or life have been made over the past century. They go from classics like Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo & Juliet (1968) to porn (2000’s A Midsummer Night’s Cream) to almost unrecognizable: How many people watching the 1956 sci-fi Forbidden Planet knew it was based on The Tempest? Few are huge hits, but some prove just how bankable the Bard can be. Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet was a commercial champ, seducing the mtv generation and pulling in $135 million at the box office. Shakespeare in Love (1998) is almost as famous for the seven Oscars it picked up as it is for Gwyneth Paltrow’s weepy acceptance speech. Almost.

If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d probably be writing movies. And Kenneth Branagh would probably direct them. A celebrated stage actor who took his love of the Bard into filmmaking, Branagh has adapted six of the canon to the big screen, starting with the award-winning Henry V in 1989. “The stories that Shakespeare writes, about kings and queens, the fates of nations and very intense domestic dramas, are written at a pitch, an extremity, that can be presented in a bold and heightened way through film,” he says. “In the theater, the words and the performances are the same, but film does it in a language people are more familiar with.” In As You Like It, due out in the summer, Branagh transfers the action to 19th century Japan, where romance blossoms against the country’s tranquil landscapes. This new setting speaks to modern audiences because, Branagh says, the play is partly about “the idea of the simple life, that feeling of getting out of the rat race, being somewhere quiet, meditative and transformative.”

Some might disagree. Which is kind of the point. Shakespeare’s work, with its complex characters and universal themes, can mean anything to anyone at any time. The possibilities are endless. “When you’re working on a Shakespeare play, you know you’re never finished,” says Branagh. “With Shakespeare films, you don’t complete them, you abandon them.”

It’s exactly this freedom to rethink, refresh and rediscover that keeps the industry alive: as long as people find new ways to pay tribute to Shakespeare, others will pay good money to join in. But it’s his words that keep them coming back for more. As Tranio says in The Taming of the Shrew, “No profit grows where is no pleasure taken.” In 1623, Condell and Heminges practically had to beg people to buy a book of Shakespeare’s work; today, he sells himself — and he sells well.

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