"When you're working on a Shakespeare play, you know you're never finished. With Shakespeare films, you don't complete them, you abandon them"
- Kenneth Branagh
"More than any other writer, he can teach us enormously about ourselves. 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"– Harold Bloom, American Shakespeare critic
LONDON: 20 March 2006: In this week's issue, TIME magazine examines the relationship between culture and cash that has followed Shakespeare since the 17th century. Today he's a trusted brand, the center of a global industry that reaches into everything from education to the economy. But had it not been for two friends who published the first collection of his plays, 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," Gary Taylor, English scholar at Florida State University told TIME. "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."
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, reports TIME. Shakespeare's plays are now translated into over 70 languages including Klingon. "Even a bad translation conveys the sense that he's great," Jean-Michel Déprats, editor of Shakespeare's complete works for France's La Pléiade Library editions told TIME. "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, reports TIME. 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," Alexey Bartoshevitch, distinguished Shakespeare scholar and professor at the Moscow-based Russian Academy of Theater Arts, told TIME.
TO THINE OWN WILL BE TRUE: For as long as people have been reading Shakespeare, there have been people writing about reading Shakespeare. "Most academics want to write about Shakespeare's plays," U.S. scholar Stephen Greenblatt told TIME. "The paradox is that most nonacademics want to read about Shakespeare's life." But the Shakespeare industry stretches far beyond the walls of the local bookstore. His image and reputation are used to sell everything from theater tickets and tour guides to the novelty underwear and board games. He can even sell you a state of mind. Most people look at Henry V and see a king trying to unite England and France, but Richard Olivier sees a CEO trying to merge two of his company's divisions. Olivier 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 told TIME. "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, DaimlerChrysler and Nokia have all sent managers to pick up a few pointers from Olivier Mythodrama, reports TIME.
GET THEE TO A TRAVEL AGENT: 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 who spend around $300 million a year, reports TIME. Come April 23, Shakespeare's birthday, that figure is going to get a boost, when the RSC launches its Complete Works Festival. 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.
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. 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. 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," Bate told TIME. "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."
If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd probably be writing movies. And Kenneth Branagh would probably direct them. "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," Branagh told TIME. "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."
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," Branagh told TIME. "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, reports TIME.
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