Shakespeare is still alive in popular culture, 400 years after his death.
As a literary historian and scholar, I sometimes ask myself, what is it that makes the great works from the past endure in the present? I think the answer might be described as a form of cultural evolution, akin to the idea in the natural sciences of Darwinian ‘natural selection’ – evolution by natural selection. The great works from the past evolve by adapting themselves to new cultural circumstances. And I think more than any other writer in history, Shakespeare is the one who has done that most effectively and in the most enduring way.
A key to the survival of a great work of art is its ability to speak beyond the moment of its conception and original production – to speak to the preoccupations, the cultural concerns, the values of later generations. And because of the extraordinary range, variety and openness of interpretation of Shakespeare's plays, he works perfectly for that. To take some recent examples, during Christmas in 2023, a classic Hollywood romantic comedy, a rom com, was released called Anyone But You. It’s about a handsome young couple – a boy called Ben and a girl called Bea – who kind of hate each other but end up loving each other. In those names, ‘Ben’ and ‘Bea’, there's a clue that this is an adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, in which the brilliantly witty lovers Benedick and Beatrice initially hate each other and end up falling in love with each other.
Similarly, just over 20 years ago at the end of the 1990s, there was a very successful teen comedy called 10 Things I Hate About You about a pair of sisters called Kat and Bianca Stratford. There's a little hint in that surname, ‘Stratford’, because this was an adaptation and modernisation of the plot line of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.
Shakespeare, in many ways, invented the idea of the witty lovers who initially don't get on with each other, and then they do. You even see that influence in Jane Austen if you think about Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, for example.
Shakespeare through the ages
These are instances where Shakespeare's plots and characters and ideas are taken, but the script is completely rewritten and modernised – Shakespeare acting as a kind of framework. Equally, there are times when filmmakers, stage directors, novelists, opera composers and others take the Shakespearean original and remake it, maybe with a contemporary spin. In the 1980s, at the time of the Falklands War, the English Touring Theatre company put on a production of Shakespeare's Henry V. And on came the Army carrying banners saying ‘F the Argies’. Instead of it being England against France in the time of Hundred Years’ War, it was England against Argentina. A play like Shakespeare's Henry V is an exploration of both patriotism but also the horrors of war. Again and again down the ages in times of war, it's been used.
This isn't just a British phenomenon. If one thinks about theatre behind the Iron Curtain during the Soviet era, where there was very strict censorship of new plays, often what would happen is that an acting company would put on a Shakespeare play but with clear clues that Shakespeare's politics and intrigue and his examination of tyrannical rule were being filtered through the present.
In Romania, for example, under the tyrannical Ceaușescu regime, there was a production of Hamlet in which Claudius and Gertrude were clearly Mr and Mrs Ceaușescu. Rather extraordinarily, the actor who played Hamlet in that production, Ion Caramitru, was actually on the tank that stormed the TV station at the moment of the revolution and then spoke to the nation, saying that the time was free.
This is not only a modern and international phenomenon. We can go right back in history and find examples of references to Shakespeare being used in popular culture as a way of reflecting on contemporary politics. Some of the work I did long ago in my PhD thesis was looking at the volatile political scene around the time of the French Revolution in the late 1700s, and I discovered an enormous number of political caricatures that filtered the events of the present. Whether it was Nelson against Napoleon or the political battles of William Pitt the Younger versus Charles James Fox, there were caricatures – especially by the great caricaturist James Gillray – that used Shakespearean scenes and quotations as a way of reflecting on those contemporary political issues.
Shakespeare, then, is a great way of avoiding censorship. Nobody's going to ban a Shakespeare play in the way that they would ban a controversial political play. So in all these respects, whether it's a stage production that transposes a play to a modern setting or whether it's a free adaptation of the text, or indeed simply a reference to it, inspiration from it – in all these ways, we see Shakespeare remaining alive in popular culture. And as I say, that's been the case ever since the 1700s, early 1800s, when the sort of ‘cult of Shakespeare’ really took off. There’s a moment in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park where a character says that we all know Shakespeare and quote Shakespeare, even if we don't realise that we're doing so.
Shakespeare is part of an Englishman's constitution. That is the amazing thing about these plays, that whatever is going on in a culture and whatever the attitudes and beliefs are of a particular audience, there’s something in Shakespeare that speaks to the present and brings the past back to life.
Sir Jonathan Bate FBA is Senior Research Fellow, Worcester College, University of Oxford; Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities, Arizona State University
