Andrew Dickson, BBC
April 22, 2014
Shakespeare was fascinated by the word ‘world’. He used it at least 650 times in his published writings, from poems written in his twenties to troubling late plays such as The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. The lovelorn aristocrat Orsino talks in Twelfth Night of how his love is “more noble than the world”, just as the narrator of the Sonnets describes “the wide world dreaming on things to come”.
In Antony and Cleopatra – where the word occurs more than any other – “world” is used to describe everything from getting drunk Egyptian-style (one of Cleopatra’s servants sniggers that “the least wind in the world” willblow the inebriated Romans over) to a measure of how much the heroine adores the hero. In the mouth of Beatrice from Much Ado about Nothing, it is a euphemism for marriage: “Thus goes everyone to the world but I,” she sighs, little knowing that she too will end up hitched before the play is done. And the word even sneaks its way into one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines, spoken by the Eeyorish Jaques in As You Like It, who informs his fellow characters (and us in the watching audience) that “all the world’s a stage” – a chill reminder that most of us are mere extras in someone else’s drama.
It is often said that Shakespeare is the world’s writer, and the 450th anniversary of his birth this month is being celebrated with the unveiling of a statue in Weimar, at academic institutions in Washington DC andParis, inside theatres in Beijing, and with 154 YouTube videos shot in New York City (not to forget the playwright’s home town of Stratford-upon-Avon, which is offering a souped-up version of its annual birthday parade). That’s fitting: in the four centuries since he died, Shakespeare has been translated into more languages than any other writer, from Arabic to Zulu, and must be the most performed and adapted playwright on the planet. When it comes to global fame, not even Agatha Christie and Danielle Steele come close. […continued]
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