What is the relevance of Shakespeare today?

If we are studying Literature then the question ‘What is the relevance of Shakespeare today?’ is a fair and very good question to ask, as well as one which commonly occurs. When we ask this we are probably aware that Shakespeare, or his works, occur at GCSE and A level study of English Literature and will more than come up at university-level study. It is difficult to assess Shakespeare’s reputation as an English playwright and poet in his own life-time of the 17^th century (the Jacobean and Caroline ‘periods’ of history) but in the 18^th century, Shakespeare dominated the London stage (whereas we might now think that he largely dominates the page), perhaps because of the ‘human’ and ‘universal’ themes and dialogues performed as entertainment by some of the most eminent, relevant performers of the time. Instead of looking at the history of Shakespeare’s reception, which arguably reached a peak in the 19^th century with the Romantics, a group of writers and thinkers who often elevated authors to the level of individualistic ‘genius’, while also celebrating the accessibility of Shakespeare via, as just one example, his combination of intellectualised wit with baudy puns (‘clenches’) and sexual or ‘low’ allusions, we might instead wish to ponder the meanings of words such as relevance and eminence.Why was, and is, Shakespeare so relevant and eminent? He is relevant and eminent because of other people, or what we might call Reader-Response or Reception Theory, which acknowledges that Shakespeare existed or exists in a world of critics and other writers who have harnessed his powers for their own views on literature, art, or indeed politics and psychology. One way we could answer the question of ‘What is the relevance of Shakespeare today?’ would be with the word POWER. Shakespeare today has power because of another question that dominates the study of Literature, which is the question of ‘the canon’, which is a question that often assumes or presupposes a uniquely ‘Western’ audience. What is the ‘Western Canon’ ? The ‘Western Canon’ is an ambiguous body of texts that traditionally served as a standard or measuring rod (the meaning of the ancient Greek κανών, kanṓn that lends us the word ‘canon’) of ‘high culture’ literature or ‘classics’, often in some lineage from the capitalised Classics of Ancient Greece and Rome or Judaeo-Christian works, of which the most relevant and eminent is the Bible. Shakespeare is canonical. Shakespeare has also had what a Marxist might call ‘Cultural Capital’, whereby we may take into account the ‘Shakespeare industry’, encapsulating films as well as books, and the general financial weight of his works throughout history, second perhaps only to the weight of his words in the Western Canon, with Shakespeare credited with creating many words now of common usage or phraseology in the English Language. Shakespeare’s power also comes from his permeability, and the constant interpretation of his performances, which in turn is partly a result of his popularity, eminence and supposed relevance. Shakespeare’s work is rebooted, modernised, changed and made hybrid, with this arguably happening because of the words on his pages, his neologisms (coining of new words), fluidities and questionings of gender and genre in his Comedies, Tragedies, and History Plays, begging interpretation, and then further interpretation once ‘founders of discursivity’ (to use a term from philosopher Michel Foucault, defined in his 1969 lecture ‘What is an Author?’ as ‘authors of theory, tradition, or discipline in which other books and authors will find their place’) like Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, have then also analysed him and his works. As we have indicated, Shakespeare’s work has always birthed interpretation, and is a backbone of the ‘Western Canon’. As well as being a supposed support or backbone to the canon, the permeability of Shakespeare’s texts, and their ‘genius’ justifiably provokes not only Marxist, Freudian or psychoanalytic readings, or readings based around Power, but also very interrelated questions about race, colonial and post-colonial issues and readings, social and historical readings about gender or/and disability, and general questions of politics and aesthetics, that go far beyond the confines of the ‘Western canon’. Our Shakespeare, then, can be a relevant and 21^st century figure, with a rich past. Shakespeare is a 21^st figure, as is Stormzy. Heavy is The Head , Stormzy’s tempest of a 2019 album, in its titling borrows from Shakespeare, and leaves him silent. One of the most known lines from Shakespeare, again about power, is Henry IV’s ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’ (usually line 26 to 31 in Act-III, Scene-I of Henry IV). In Shakespeare’s titular play, the character of Henry IV, a usurper to the throne in an age when the ‘divine right’ or God conferred power of kings was commonly believed, arguably acknowledges his own personal ‘unease’, literally meaning lack of ease or discomfort, as a ruler or head of state who came to power without ‘divine right’. The image of the ‘crown’ in the line and its placement on the head which makes the head ‘uneasy’, geometrically and visually off-kilter, places the ‘crown’, and the ‘head’ wearing it in an awkward balancing act, somewhat at odds with the sonorous weighting of the line, which is of a particularly monosyllabic iambic pentameter, aurally replicating a regular, heavy weight. In short, the rhythm of the line corresponds well with the imagery. ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’ in its slowness and spacing lends itself well to a proverbial phrase. We may notice that ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’ has become, in popular phraseology, ‘Heavy is the head that wears the crown’, an adaption that makes Shakespeare more accessible, more of the ‘common speech’ of today, rather than the time of writing. In today’s common phraseology the ‘crown’ becomes a metaphor for any weighty task of considerable responsibility, often quite a bit removed from the threat of death that we may detect in the passivity of Henry IV’s line, whereby the head ‘lies’, as if dead, indicating the threat of assassination Henry may feel, while also offering the possibility, because of the grammar conventions of the time, to suggest Henry IV’s own feelings of inadequacy and falsehood, his lie, as a usurper to the throne. Stormzy’s balance of modesty and respect with his current status as a king of U.K grime plays with Shakespearean notions of kingship, power, and speech, in the album title Heavy is The Head, which is quite far removed from, say, Kanye West’s concerns with kingship, such as his 2011 album Watch the Throne. Here, there is possibility for further tracing of both artists notions of kingship, with one perhaps seeing themselves in a ‘divine right of kings’ and the other, not so much. When does the desire to call oneself King become the desire to run for President? How does a secular king talk, in Shakespeare’s time and ours? How does rap relate to plays (drama)? The point is that Shakespeare’s relevance can be our relevance, especially as students at whatever level. If we are interested in politics, as a student we could focus on that: ‘my kingdom for a horse’. If we are interested more in advertising and media than Shakespeare on the page, but we need to answer questions on Shakespeare on the page for our exam, we could look at the persuasive power of Shakespeare’s writings and that of his characters; to go even further we could analyse the famous quote ‘to be or not to be’ and the meaning behind this, and the meaning behind its transmutation into themes of ‘to have or not to have’ in, say, the world of advertising. Persuasion, politics, economics, and song, are not far removed from Shakespeare’s concerns. If we are studying Literature today then the question ‘What is the relevance of Shakespeare today?’ is a fair and very good question to ask, and a powerful one at that.