By Paul Smith for The Huffington Post, 30 October 2015
As Macbeth would have it, our Autumnal times “have fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf,” our Winter’s Tale approaches and before too long it will be Twelfth Night and the start of the quatercentenary commemoration year of the death of Shakespeare (or the start of his legacy as the less morbidly minded prefer). As the world — and it will be the whole world — marks the 2016 anniversary, we might recall the dying and departing exclamations of some of his greatest creations.
Tell my story! says Hamlet, pleading that the magnitude of his experience continue to inform the world, just as his own father had pleaded Remember me!
Look there! cries King Lear desperately begging a distraught gaggle of war survivors and a stunned audience to witness, to see better
And Prospero’s direct ask of us, of his audience, of all his audiences from 1611 to 2016 and across all countries of the world, is, by our applause, to set me free!
In 2016 the world gathers to applaud, to set Shakespeare free, liberating his plays into the meaning of our times. We remember him and must tell his story.
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