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2016 | Book

Introduction Read chapter Read first chapter

Shakespeare’s Cultural Capital

His Economic Impact from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-first Century

Editors: Dominic Shellard, Siobhan Keenan

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Table of Contents

Frontmatter
1. Introduction
Abstract
Subsequent research into the economic difficulties experienced by late sixteenth-century England might have encouraged scholars such as Melissa Aaron to reconsider John Maynard Keynes’ famous remark and to observe that ‘England produced Shakespeare when she could least afford him’, but Keynes’ comment usefully highlights the fact that Shakespeare’s work was financed and made possible by money and the emergence of a professionalised theatrical market in late sixteenth-century London.2 It also reminds us that Shakespeare’s ‘value’ and impact in the UK and beyond has been economic as well as cultural. Early twentieth-century scholars were quick to celebrate the cultural importance of Shakespeare, but the world of Shakespeare studies has been slower to acknowledge the economic importance of Shakespeare’s works and name, despite the fact that the scholarly Shakespeare industry has itself been partly based on the ongoing marketability of England’s most famous playwright and his art.
Siobhan Keenan, Dominic Shellard
2. Shakespeare and the Market in His Own Day
Abstract
Writing only shortly after Shakespeare’s death, Thomas Randolph (and/or his reviser F. J.) claim that the world’s most famous dramatist was motivated to write his plays by the ‘Great God of Money’. It is an assertion which would have troubled many early Shakespeare scholars, most of whom were reluctant to see Shakespeare as a commercially driven artist. Indeed, as Douglas Bruster notes, ‘for a long time, most commentators ignored the economic bases of Shakespeare’s theatre’ and when they did mention it ‘they typically portrayed it as regrettable’.2 However, as recent research on the early modern stage has made clear, the world of which Shakespeare was a part was a commercial — as well as a creative — industry; and Shakespeare’s success within it is evidence not just of his artistic talent, but of the commercial ‘nous’ of himself and his fellow players in the company with whom he worked for most of his career: the Lord Chamberlain’s (later the King’s) players.
Siobhan Keenan
3. Shakespeare and the Impact of Editing
Abstract
As readers, almost all of us first encounter Shakespeare in a modern printed edition of his works rather than something resembling the forms in which his first readers encountered him. The conventions of spelling in Shakespeare’s time present a barrier that modern editors feel obliged to remove. It is hard enough to understand what Caesar means when he says ‘What touches us ourself shall be last served’ (Julius Caesar, 3.1.8) without having to read it in the original spelling and punctuation as ‘What touches vs our felfe, shall be last feru’d’.1 The old-fashioned long s, the appearance of u where we would expect v and vice versa, the abbreviation of preterite verb endings (‘d), and the use of punctuation to show pauses for breathing rather than to mark off grammatical clauses — if indeed that is why a comma here obtrudes between a verb and its subject — convey nothing we really need to know. These features merely distance Shakespeare’s writing from modern readers.
Gabriel Egan
4. Marketing Shakespeare Films: From Tragedy to Biopic
Abstract
In the sound era, the so-called heyday of film adaptations, Shakespeare and film became identified, as Louis B. Mayer famously declared, with Hollywood tragedy, or more precisely as box office poison.1 Indeed the so-called ‘Prestige’ productions of the film studios, United Artists’ Taming of the Shrew, directed by Sam Taylor, 1929, Warner Brothers’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, 1935, MGM’s Romeo and Juliet, directed by George Cukor, 1936, and the British (Inter-Allied) adaptation, As You Like It, directed by Paul Czinner, 1936 (best known today for Laurence Olivier’s first appearance on screen in a Shakespeare film), were box office flops, in spite of their frantic and multi-angled marketing campaigns. Their only achievements at the time of their releases were dubious prestige for the film companies during a period in which Hollywood was besieged by complaints about the shallow, violent and lascivious content of the movies. This chapter considers the marketing of Shakespeare films in the early sound period, which, whilst failing to convince moviegoers of the cinematic qualities of the Shakespeare films that were being promoted, contained many of the ingredients contributing to the most financially successful Shakespeare film to date: John Madden’s biopic of 1998, Shakespeare in Love.
Deborah Cartmell
5. Shakespearean Actors, Memes, Social Media and the Circulation of Shakespearean ‘Value’
Abstract
A young boy slopes late into his English classroom after skipping school to watch a blockbuster starring his favourite action hero, Jack Slater. His teacher introduces a clip from Laurence Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet to the dismay of her charges, telling them that they might recognize its British actor from the Polaroid commercials or, with slight resignation, ‘as Zeus in Clash of the Titans’. The boy is Danny Madigan (Austen O’Brien), the protagonist of Last Action Hero; his favourite star is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and, pleasingly, his English teacher by Joan Plowright. Satirizing the associations of different cultural modes such as Shakespearean drama, classical music and the action genre, the 1993 film subverts the audience’s expectations in order to parody them. Olivier becomes the man from the Polaroid commercials and his expressionistic Hamlet a Slater star vehicle. Contemplating Hamlet’s most famous line, Schwarzenegger decides, ‘To be or not to be … Not to be’. Meanwhile, Olivier’s noirish colour palette is lit by sparks from the play’s newly interpolated action scenes. Although a comic adaptation, Last Action Hero’s blockbuster Hamlet offers a valuable introduction to the subject of this chapter: the role of actors in the shaping of our understanding of Shakespearean ‘value’ (in both an economic and a cultural sense).
Anna Blackwell
6. Ales, Beers, Shakespeares
Abstract
Boy Would I were in an alehouse in London. I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety. (Henry V, 3.2.10–11)1
Here the Boy in Henry V, on the night before Agincourt, expresses his homesick longing to be out of danger, in a familiar alehouse, drinking a pot of ale. Far from the ‘vasty fields of France’ (1.Prologue.10), the national drink comes to represent shelter and safety; an alehouse in England, a pot of ale that is home. The Boy is of course killed the next day, so he never makes it home, and his pot of ale remains eternally untasted.
Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey
7. A King Rediscovered: The Economic Impact of Richard III and Richard III on the City of Leicester
Abstract
For those seeking to rehabilitate the reputation of Richard III from centuries of opprobrium (primarily for allegedly both deposing his nephew Edward V in 1483 and then having him and his brother, Richard, murdered in the Tower of London), Shakespeare’s play offers a significant and, at times, irritating challenge.
Dominic Shellard
8. Shakespeare Is ‘GREAT’
Abstract
While William Shakespeare has had over 400 years to nurture and grow his globally iconic and emblematic brand, the UK Government’s highly innovative GREAT Britain Campaign (‘GREAT’) has had just four. Yet, by showcasing the very best the UK has to offer the world in terms of trade, investment, tourism, education and culture, the impact that GREAT has had already on its target markets has been highly significant, in terms of both economic gain and soft power influence. At the heart of GREAT’s global message is its focus on promoting UK leadership and expertise in creativity as a way of differentiating the nation against key competitors such as Germany, France and Italy. To achieve this, the GREAT campaign has worked in close partnership with many of the UK’s most iconic corporate and personal brands including Jaguar Land Rover, James Bond, British Airways, Burberry, David Beckham and the Royal Family. Given Shakespeare’s contemporary relevance globally as a cultural and soft power asset for the UK, it was inevitable that he would also become part of the GREAT campaign and, with the ongoing global celebrations of his key anniversaries, the bard from Stratford-upon-Avon is taking centre stage. His cultural significance globally — indeed his ability to take stories from overseas, add creative value to them and then ‘export’ them again to the world — continues to have a resonance for modern-day UK business.
Conrad Bird, Jason Eliadis, Harvey Scriven
9. Sponsoring Shakespeare
Abstract
There is, by now, a long critical history of how Shakespeare has been appropriated and performed in advertising campaigns for a remarkable diversity of consumer products, from StarKist canned tuna to easyJet’s low-cost air travel, from Red Bull energy drinks to Google+.1 Even more commonplace is the analysis of how the Bard is deployed to promote cultural institutions and places involved directly in the production of his works. In this context, Shakespeare’s role in cultural tourism has been particularly well documented, and not just in the obvious locations of Stratford-upon-Avon and London, but in festival cities such as Stratford, Ontario and Ashland, Oregon.2 Against the backdrop of this expansive Shakespeare ‘industry’, Kate McLuskie and Kate Rumbold have explored whether Shakespeare can rightly be considered a ‘brand’, suggesting that what is at stake ‘is the question of how Shakespeare’s value is constructed and conferred in commercial settings’.3 I am interested here in taking up the notion of value in practices of corporate sponsorship. In particular, I want to explore how value was assumed and attained by Shakespeare’s presence in the Cultural Olympiad attached to London 2012 and, specifically, the relationship of his ‘brand’ to corporate sponsors for both the arts programming and the larger sporting event.
Susan Bennett
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Shakespeare’s Cultural Capital
Editors
Dominic Shellard
Siobhan Keenan
Copyright Year
2016
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Electronic ISBN
978-1-137-58316-1
Print ISBN
978-1-137-58315-4
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-58316-1

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