Ten ways in which Shakespeare

changed the world

This week marks 400 years since the death of our national poet. And yet his
characters, the worlds he created, the thoughts he expressed – some raw, fashioned
in fire, some exquisite and turned in silk – are for all people and all time

Robert McCrum

Sun 17 Apr 2016 07.00 BSTLast modified on Sat 2 Dec 2017 04.33 GMT

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 Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in his 1948 film. Photograph: Ronald Grant

Back in 2012, the British Library displayed a rare book that attracted as much media
attention as a Gutenberg Bible. It was a mass-produced edition of a text once owned
by Nelson Mandela, inked with his pen. Mandela had kept this volume by his bedside
for more than 20 years and it had sustained him through his darkest hours on
Robben Island. Sometimes he had read aloud from it to his cellmates.

It was not scripture, but its sacred characters – from Hamlet to Prospero – had often
been a source of inspiration. Mandela, son of a Xhosa chief, was born and grew up in
Transkei, 6,000 miles from Britain. English was never his mother tongue. But,
speaking about the Collected Works of William Shakespeare, he once said:
“Shakespeare always seems to have something to say to us.”

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That heartfelt response is, perhaps, Shakespeare’s most astonishing achievement.

Four hundred years on, his unique gift to our culture, language and imagination has
been to universalise the experience of living and writing in late 16th-century England
and to have become widely recognised, and loved, across the world as the greatest
playwright.

Shakespeare’s double life, as both an English and a universal artist (poet and
playwright), begins with the First Folio of 1623. His friend Ben Jonson, addressing
“the Reader”, initially says that “gentle Shakespeare” is the “soul of the age”, placing
him firmly in a metropolitan context, as “the wonder of our stage”. A few lines later,
however, Jonson contradicts himself, declaring that his rival “was not of an age, but
for all time”.

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This dynamic duality runs throughout Shakespeare’s life and work, making him an
androgynous and timeless shape-shifter who is impossible to pin down. He’s “a man
of fire-new words” (“equivocal”, “prodigious” and “antipathy”, for instance, get their
first citations from him), with a vocabulary of 30,000 words. But he is also the master
of the simplest construction, such as Henry’s devastating rebuke to Falstaff (“I know
thee not, old man”) or Leontes touching Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale (“O,
she’s warm”), three words that any child could understand.

Every generation continues to be in his debt. Shakespeare’s plots, which are

brilliantly polyvalent, continue to inspire ceaseless adaptations and spin-offs. His
unforgettable phrase-making recurs on the lips of millions who do not realise they are
quoting Shakespeare: “a fool’s paradise”; “the game is up”; “dead as a doornail”;
“more in sorrow than in anger”; “cruel, only to be kind”; and dozens more. Elsewhere,
words and phrases from his plays have become seeded into the titles of countless
novels and films from Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) and The Sound and the
Fury (William Faulkner) to The Glimpses of the Moon (Edith Wharton) and The
Dogs of War (Frederick Forsyth).

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As well as giving the English language a kick-start, Shakespeare can also conjure
characters apparently out of nowhere, giving “to airy nothing a local habitation and a
name”. He has populated our imagination like no other writer: Hamlet, Juliet’s
Nurse, Macbeth, Mistress Quickly, Lear, Othello, Shylock, Portia, Prospero and
Romeo … the list of classic archetypes stretches out to the crack of doom (Macbeth), a
cast of characters perhaps more real to us than any others in our literature.

The plays, often rooted in ancient myth, in which these theatrical legends appear,
have become archetypal stories, too. More than Dante for the Italians, Goethe for the
Germans, or Pushkin for Russia, Shakespeare remains an icon for English-
speaking peoples throughout the world. Such ambitions came naturally. From the
first, he was always pitching his work on the biggest stage imaginable. The motto of
the Globe, his theatre, was Totus mundus agit histrionem (The whole world is a
playhouse).

At the same time, as a glover’s son and a grammar-school boy from Stratford,
Shakespeare projects a uniquely English, and rather modest, sensibility. His plays
seem to tell us that here is a great writer who is happily steeped in low culture and the
English countryside as much as court politics and affairs of state. There is something
appealingly English, even offhand, about his titles: As You Like It, Much Ado About
Nothing and All’s Well That Ends Well. Even Twelfth Night is subtitled What You
Will. The young Shakespeare’s message to his audiences seems to be that there might
be other things to do than write plays. As well as the nailbiting intensity
of Othello or Macbeth, Shakespeare can embody the laid-back nonchalance of the
English amateur.

Typically, Shakespeare seems to have left the stage with scarcely a backward glance.
He simply retired to Stratford, collaborated a bit with a few former associates, got
drunk with some old friends and died, having bequeathed his “second-best bed” to
Anne Hathaway, his wife.

Despite having forever changed English life, language and culture, at home and
abroad, Shakespeare remains an enigma. His work is a mirror on which we can reflect
themes of love and hate, war and peace, freedom and tyranny, but the man himself is
mysterious. After 400 years, such magical invisibility makes him more than ever
godlike.

William Shakespeare and the American Dream, by Robert McCrum, is broadcast on

BBC Radio 4 at 9am on 19 April and 24 April.

Language

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 The 1623 First Folio was the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Photograph: Sang
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Shakespeare was a writer who always seemed to be able to do what he wanted with
the language, marrying Anglo-Saxon, continental and classical traditions in a weave
of poetry and storytelling. The dramatist of the First Folio was a literary magpie, “a
snapper-up of unconsidered trifles” and a master of artistic synthesis. The Stratford
of his youth lurks behind the facades of Verona, Syracuse or Padua, just as the
“citizens” of his Vienna, Rome or Athens seem to have stepped straight out of
Cheapside or Southwark. When the good vernacular gets braided with Latin coinages,
the English language is remade and renewed.
Modern man

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 A skull presented by Victor Hugo to Sarah Bernhardt for her performance as Hamlet.
Photograph: Clare Kendall

“Who’s there?” is the opening line of Shakespeare’s most famous

play. Hamlet answers this uniquely modern question by redefining the theatrical
expression of identity. It’s a project Shakespeare revels in. “What a piece of work is a
man!” exclaims Hamlet, in the voice of the playwright. Shakespeare’s student prince
is the first western dramatic protagonist to be conceived as an individual tormented
by complex inner conflicts and desires. “To be, or not to be”, Hamlet’s contemplation
of suicide, is a pioneering and sensational moment of post-renaissance drama:
stunning poetry articulating brilliant psychology. Later, in the celebrated
gravedigging scene, “Alas, poor Yorick” juxtaposes high and low culture to articulate
the mature Shakespeare’s existential vision of human frailty.

The American dream

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 The sculputre of Shakespeare in New York’s Central Park: a symbol of his role in
American life. Photograph: Steve Lewis Stock/Getty Images
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Shakespeare is not just an icon of Englishness. He’s also a central feature of the
American dream, in which the mirror of his great dramas gets held up to a society
permanently in search of itself. When former president Bill Clinton says “our
engagement with Shakespeare has been long and sustained: generation after
generations of Americans has fallen under his spell,“ he’s acknowledging this most
surprising fact – that Shakespeare’s afterlife as the greatest playwright is now as
much an American as a British phenomenon, integral to American culture and
society. His statue in New York’s Central Park, erected by the brother of John Wilkes
Booth after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, symbolises the role of Shakespeare
in American life.

Heritage

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 David Garrick as Richard III. Photograph: Alamy

The actor David Garrick almost single-handedly resurrected Shakespeare’s 18th-

century reputation with his Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769, a belated recognition of the
playwright’s bicentenary. Stratford now became the hub of the Shakespeare memorial
industry (gloves, rings, mugs, knick-knacks). Two future US presidents, Jefferson and
Adams, visited “the birthplace” on Henley Street and paid a shilling to see
Shakespeare’s grave. “There was nothing preserved of this great genius,” wrote
Adams, sadly, “which might inform us what accident turned his mind to letters and
drama.” This has never inhibited the American “bardolatry” which, during the 19th
century, would morph into bizarre (and ultimately pointless) disputes about the
authorship of the plays.

Film
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 My Own Private Idaho: Gus van Sant’s take on Henry IV Photograph: Moviestore
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Othello (lust, jealousy, and betrayal), Macbeth (paranoid regicide), Romeo &

Juliet (doomed love) and many of Shakespeare’s greatest plays were an instant hit
with Elizabethan audiences. Hollywood scriptwriters quickly latched on to
Shakespeare’s (often borrowed) plots and icons. Great stars hanker after the great
roles: Olivier playing Henry V, Paul Robeson playing Othello, Orson Welles playing
Falstaff, and Gielgud playing Prospero. Similarly, Macbeth inspired
Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood; Gus van Sant remade Henry IV as My Own Private
Idaho; and Ran is a classic Japanese homage to King Lear.

Celebrity

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 The Chandos Portrait, one of several contested images of Shakespeare. Photograph:
National Portrait Gallery/PA

This portrait of Shakespeare, one of several contested images, seems to capture the
artist in his prime. Here is the “soul of the age”, the author of The
Sonnets, Hamlet, As You Like It and Henry V, taking a break from the playhouse to
practise something he rarely enjoyed: promoting his image. The writer described as
“not a company keeper” was usually too busy with literary and theatre business to
waste time on self-publicity. He understood that it was the work that mattered, not
the hoopla that accompanied it. Unlike Ben Jonson, his competitor and
contemporary, he seems to have showed virtually no interest in posterity.

Psychology
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 Shakespearean thinker: Sigmund Freud Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images
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Freud thought Shakespeare “the greatest of poets” and was always ready with apt
quotations from the collected works. His recognition of the unconscious took
Shakespeare’s fascination with the mind of man to a new level and he scattered the
poet’s insights throughout his own psychoanalytic writing. Freud’s stock-in-trade –
duplicity, envy, desire, and conscience – is all grist to Shakespeare’s mill, from
“there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face” to “the stroke of death is as
a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired”. When Richard III is facing his downfall,
he declares: “Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devis’d at first to keep the
strong in awe.”

History

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 A facial reconstruction of Richard III, based on the remains discovered in Leicester.
Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Shakespeare, the Tudor propagandist and author of Richard III, still dominates the
narrative of English history. His devastating portrait of the hunchbacked king as a
“bottled spider” has had a long afterlife. Not even Shakespeare could have anticipated
the discovery of the deposed king’s bones in a Leicester car park though he would
have relished the irony. In the play, the king’s disguise of his “naked villainy” is
Shakespeare at his most potent, caricaturing Richard’s ambition to “seem a saint,
when most I play the devil”. Abroad, the play still resonates as a lethal blend of
tragedy and history. In the darkest days of the Watergate scandal it would be
resurrected in America as a commentary on Richard Nixon’s abuse of power.

Refugees

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 Shakespeare’s handwriting in The Book of Sir Thomas More. Photograph: The
British Library
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The Holy Grail of Shakespeare scholarship: an autograph manuscript. The text of Sir
Thomas More was a collaboration, typical of Shakespeare’s apprenticeship. It is,
however, the only surviving manuscript, apart from some legal documents, in which
the playwright’s handwriting (“Hand D”) can be clearly detected. This thrilling
document also demonstrates the playwright unerringly drawn to a timeless (and
modern) theme – the fate of the dispossessed. The speech Shakespeare writes here
contains an impassioned plea for sympathy and understanding towards the plight of
refugees.

Music

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 West Side Story: a worldwide hit in its film version. Photograph: United
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 Shakespeare’s genius for dramatic clarity makes his work perfect for opera. Verdi was
obsessed with the plays. Three of his finest operas (Macbeth; Otello; Falstaff) are
Shakespearean. West Side Story (Romeo & Juliet) is not just Bernstein’s masterpiece.
In 1961, the film of the production became a worldwide hit. Other great classical
composers who loved Shakespeare include Berlioz (The Tempest), Mendelssohn
(Midsummer Night’s Dream), and Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, both inspired
by Romeo & Juliet. More popularly, Shakespeare would have loved Cole Porter’s
music for The Taming of the Shrew (Kiss Me Kate) and his celebrated Brush Up Your
Shakespeare, a theme song for this quatercentenary.

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Shakespeare and Modern Culture’

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By Marjorie Garber
 Dec. 10, 2008

INTRODUCTION

The premise of this book is simple and direct: Shakespeare makes modern culture
and modern culture makes Shakespeare. I could perhaps put the second
"Shakespeare" in quotation marks, so as to indicate that what I have in mind is our
idea of Shakespeare and of what is Shakespearean. But in fact it will be my claim that
Shakespeare and "Shakespeare" are perceptually and conceptually the same from the
viewpoint of any modern observer.

Characters like Romeo, Hamlet, or Lady Macbeth have become cultural types,
instantly recognizable when their names are invoked. As will become clear, the
modern versions of these figures often differ significantly from their Shakespearean
"originals": a "Romeo" is a persistent romancer and philanderer rather than a lover
faithful unto death, a "Hamlet" is an indecisive overthinker, and a "Lady Macbeth," in
the public press, is an ambitious female politician who will stop at nothing to gain her
own ends. But the very changes marked by these appropriations tell a revealing story
about modern culture and modern life.

The idea that Shakespeare is modern is, of course, hardly a modern idea. Indeed, it is
one of the fascinating effects of Shakespeare's plays that they have almost always
seemed to coincide with the times in which they are read, published, produced, and
discussed. But the idea that Shakespeare writes us - as if we were Tom Stoppard's
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, constantly encountering our own prescripted
identities, proclivities, beliefs, and behaviors - is, if taken seriously, both exciting and
disconcerting.

I will suggest in what follows that Shakespeare has scripted many of the ideas that we
think of as "naturally" our own and even as "naturally" true: ideas about human
character, about individuality and selfhood, about government, about men and
women, youth and age, about the qualities that make a strong leader. Such ideas are
not necessarily first encountered today in the realm of literature - or even of drama
and theater. Psychology, sociology, political theory, business, medicine, and law have
all welcomed and recognized Shakespeare as the founder, authorizer, and forerunner
of important categories and practices in their fields. Case studies based on
Shakespearean characters and events form an important part of education and theory
in leadership institutes and business schools as well as in the history of
psychoanalysis. In this sense Shakespeare has made modern culture, and modern
culture returns the favor.

The word "Shakespearean" today has taken on its own set of connotations, often quite
distinct from any reference to Shakespeare or his plays. A cartoon by Bruce Eric
Kaplan in The New Yorker shows a man and a woman walking down a city street,
perhaps headed for a theater or a movie house. The caption reads, "I don't mind if
something's Shakespearean, just as long as it's not Shakespeare." "Shakespearean" is
now an all- purpose adjective, meaning great, tragic, or resonant: it's applied to
events, people, and emotions, whether or not they have any real relevance to
Shakespeare.

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Journalists routinely describe the disgrace of a public leader as a "downfall of

Shakespearean proportions" - as for example in the case of Canadian financier
Conrad Black, whose plight was also called a "fall from grace of Shakespearean
proportions," and who was described as the victim of a "betrayal of almost
Shakespearean proportion." In a book on the U.S. military involvement in Iraq and
Afghanistan, a former CIA officer describes the results as "self- imposed tragedies of
unplanned- for length and Shakespearean proportions." Here the word "tragedies"
makes the link between military misadventures and Shakespearean drama. The effect
of a series of Danish cartoons that gave offense to Muslims was "Shakespearean in
proportions"; the final episodes of The Sopranos were "a bloodbath of Shakespearean
proportions"; and the steroid scandal in professional baseball was a plot that
had"thickened to Shakespearean proportions."

Vivid personalities like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and William Randolph
Hearst have likewise been described as figures of "Shakespearean proportions" or
"Shakespearean dimensions." Nor is it only national or international news that now
makes the Shakespeare grade: a headline in the Daily Telegraph of London declared
that "throwing a children's party can be a drama of Shakespearean proportions." And
an article in the tabloid New York Post began, "A Shakespearean tragedy played out
on a Long Island street where a boozed- up young woman unknowingly dragged her
boyfriend under her car for more than a block as he tried to stop her from driving
drunk." "Shakespearean" in these contexts means something like "ironic" or
"astonishing" or "uncannily well plotted." Over time the adjectival form of the
playwright's name has become an intensifier, indicating a degree of magnitude, a
scale of effect.

Why should this be the case? And what does it say about the interrelationship
between Shakespeare and modern culture?

"Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how," says one earnest
young man in a Jane Austen novel to another. "It is a part of an Englishman's
constitution," his companion is quick to concur. "No doubt one is familiar with
Shakespeare in a degree," he says, "from one's earliest years. His celebrated passages
are quoted by every body; they are in half the books we open and we all talk
Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions." This was modern
culture, circa 1814. In the view of these disarmingly ordinary, not very bookish
observers, Shakespeare was the author of their common language, the poet and
playwright who inspired and shaped their thought.
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In 1828 Sir Walter Scott, already a celebrated novelist, "visited the tomb of the
mighty wizard," as he wrote. He had a plaster cast made of the Shakespeare portrait
bust in Holy Trinity Church, and he designed "a proper shrine for the Bard of Avon"
in the library of his home at Abbotsford, making sure that the bust was "fitted with an
altar worthy of himself." Scott noticed that the two of them - Scott and Shakespeare -
shared the same initials, W.S. He had their head sizes measured and compared by a
German phrenologist. A bust of Scott was designed to resemble that of the other
Bard, and after Scott's death the bust of his head replaced that of Shakespeare in the
library. Admiration here became identification - or perhaps a kind of rivalry.

Image
Marjorie GarberCredit...Beverly Hall

Shakespeare's modernity would also be proclaimed in nineteenth- century America.

In 1850 Ralph Waldo Emerson announced that, after centuries in which Shakespeare
had been inadequately understood, the time was finally right for him: "It was not
possible to write the history of Shakespeare till now," Emerson wrote. The word
"now" in his argument becomes the marker of that shifting category of the modern,
and it is repeated for emphasis a few lines later. "Now, literature, philosophy, and
thought, are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do
not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm."13 Thus Emerson could say of
Shakespeare, simply and resoundingly, "he wrote the text of modern life." We live
today in a new "now," a century and a half removed from Emerson's, but this
sentiment - "he wrote the text of modern life" - seems as accurate as it did then.

Nor - as we have already noted - is this view the special province of literary authors.
The frequency with which practitioners and theorists of many of the "new" modern
sciences and social sciences - anthropology, psychology, sociology - have turned to
Shakespeare for inspiration is striking, but not surprising. Ernest Jones, Freud's
friend and biographer, the first English language practitioner of psychoanalysis,
declared straightforwardly (in an essay he began in 1910, revised in 1923, and
expanded in the 1940s)that "Shakespeare was the first modern." Why? Because he
understood so well the issues of psychology. "The essential difference between
prehistoric and civilized man," Jones argued, was that "the difficulties with which the
former had to contend came from without," while "those with which the latter have to
contend really come from within,"

This inner conflict modern psychologists know as neurosis, and it is only by study of
neurosis that one can learn the fundamental motives and instincts that move men.
Here, as in so many other respects, Shakespeare was the first modern.

Thus for Jones, Shakespeare's use of the soliloquy, the onstage, interior questioning
of a character's conflicted thoughts and motives, anticipated the new science of
psychoanalysis and Freud's "talking cure."

THE "text of modern life" these days is embedded in a network of text messaging,
Internet connections, video clips, and file sharing. Shakespeare in our culture is
already disseminated, scattered, appropriated, part of the cultural language, high and
low. An advertisement for rugged outdoors types advertised a sale: "Now Is the
Winter of Our Discount Tents." This turned out also to be the name of a rock
compilation by the label Twisted Nerve. At the same time, in London, the White Cube
Gallery presented an exhibition of work by British artist Neal Tait, titled "Now Is the
Discount of Our Winter Tents." Manifestly, none of these tweaked or inverted phrases
would offer much in the way of wit or appeal if the cultural consumer did not
recognize, or half recognize, the phrase on which each is based: the opening soliloquy
of Richard III, in which the envious and aspiring Gloucester observes, in a classic of
double- meaning enjambment, that "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made
glorious summer by this son of York" (1.1.1-2). So we might say that Shakespeare is
already not only modern but postmodern: a simulacrum, a replicant, a montage, a
bricolage. A collection of found objects, repurposed as art.

Our Shakespeare is often "sampled" and "texted" in forms from advertising to cartoon
captions. Lady Macbeth's exclamation in the sleepwalking scene, "Out, damned spot!"
(Macbeth 4.1.33), is so well-known that it has been used to describe stain removers,
acne medicine, and cleaning technologies for semiconductors. An ad for Hard Candy
cosmetics extends the literary allusion, offering not only the "Out Damn Spot"
concealer pencil to cover up blemishes, but also a coordinated line of makeup called
"Macbare" and "Macbuff." I call this a "literary allusion," but it is a quite different
kind from those of an earlier period. Although the writers of copy here assume a
recognition of Macbeth as the source, there is no extended expectation of familiarity
with the text. The wit inheres in the dislocation from context("Lay on, Macbuff "?).

Popular culture examples of this kind are virtually ubiquitous. Hamlet's phrase "The
undiscover'd country from whose bourn / No traveller returns" (Hamlet 3.1.79-80)
has been used as the subtitle of Star Trek VI, the title of an art exhibition on
representational painting at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the brand
name of a company offering bicycle tours in California. The bionic skeleton used for
decades by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to demonstrate artificial body
parts was named Yorick, after "the exhumed skull in Shakespeare's Hamlet."
Sometimes the Shakespeare quotation has moved so far into the mainstream that
there is little or no acknowledgment of any connection with the source. Economist
Greg Mankiw chose the phrase "Strange Bedfellows" as the headline of a short piece
on Al Gore and supply- side economists of the 1980s. Although there may have been
some tacit comparison between these figures and Shakespeare's Caliban and
Trinculo, there's no evidence of it in the piece - and really no necessity. Shakespeare
sampled, Shakespeare quoted without quotation marks, has become a lingua franca
of modern cultural exchange.

The cultural "Q" value of something often goes up when its familiarity and utility go
down. An antique shop that specializes in folk art will display objects like churns,
crocks, quilts, and spinning wheels - once valued for their use and now many times
more valuable, in sheer dollar terms, despite being useless. And the further we get as
a society from intimate knowledge of the language and characters of the plays, the
more "love" of Shakespeare begins to be expressed as a cultural value. Shakespeare's
plays are probably read and studied more, these days, before and after college - in
high school and in reading groups, extension courses, lifelong learning and leadership
institutes, and in the preparation of audiences attending play productions - than
 during the four years of traditional undergraduate college education. Preprofessional
training starts earlier, college majors are more specialized than once they were, and
there is less expectation of a broad general education or liberal arts foundation than
was the case a generation or two ago. Shakespeare becomes the treat, as well as the
all- purpose cultural upgrade, for which time is found later in life, after more basic,
pragmatic skills and knowledge are acquired.

Thus it is not perhaps a surprise to discover that some of the most avid and interested
students of Shakespeare today are businesspeople, CEOs and CFOs of major national
and international companies. Shakespeare's plays are now being used, regularly and
with success, to teach corporate executives lessons about business. A few of the
analogies the CEOs and their facilitators make may seem facile (the appearance of the
ghost of old Hamlet is like the reminder that executives are accountable to their
shareholders; CEOs, like the kings and queens in the plays, have to face the necessity
of betraying - or firing - their friends). But the business of teaching Shakespeare- in-
business has become popular and lucrative as a sideline for both government officials
no longer in power and Shakespeare companies struggling to make a living. The play
that has most galvanized business leaders has been Henry V, whose protagonist, the
leader of a "band of brothers," produced unit cohesion and triumphed against
apparently insurmountable odds; I use some of the discussions among what might be
called "business Shakespeareans" as examples in my chapter on that play.

In these encounters, "Shakespeare" often becomes a standardized plot, a stereotypical

character, and, especially, a moral or ethical choice - not to mention the ubiquitous
favorite, "a voice of authority," as if it were possible to locate "his" voice among the
mix of Hamlet, Macbeth, Falstaff, Rosalind, Portia, Iago, the Ghost, and the Fool.
(The CEOs are not often asked to see the play through the lens of a minor character,
an old man, a young woman, an attendant lord, or a common soldier; they are kings
and queens, generals, Machiavels, decision makers all.) What may sometimes drop
out here, crucially, is the complexity of language and of plotting, the ultimate
undecidability or overdetermination of phrases, words, and actions. Reading against
the grain - trying to gather a multiplicity of sometimes conflicting meanings from any
staged scene or passage - itself cuts against the grain of CEO management and
decision- making. Perhaps the key phrase here ought to be, not "Falstaff, c'est moi" -
as one executive was quoted as saying - but instead Iago's "I am not what I am."

Reprinted from SHAKESPEARE AND MODERN CULTURE, by Marjorie Garber. Copyright

(c) 2008. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Pantheon.
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