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Will at the Movies When film stars want to get serious, they turn
to Hamlet as with Laurence Olivier, 1948 |
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Posted Sunday, March 19, 2006; 10.31GMT
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."
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