Access is one of the unquestionable goods of our time. But is it good that everything should be, or be made to seem, accessible? In particular, is it in the long run helpful if things that are difficult of access should be misrepresented as standing open to casual inquiry? These general questions are raised by this lively and provocative new book on Shakespeare, written by Emma Smith, a professor in the English Faculty at Oxford.
Whether or not he is or should be accessible, it is certainly the case that Shakespeare has never been more available. Editions of the plays proliferate, in both multi-volume and single-volume form. Online resources seem almost limitless. The performance archive expands daily. Film versions and adaptations have multiplied. Nor is this simply a UK phenomenon. I have been living for the past six months in Munich. During that time and within the city limits I could not easily have seen a production of a play by either Schiller or Brecht. But I was able to attend excellent productions of Macbethand Romeo and Juliet, expertly performed in English before appreciative and apparently—to judge from overheard conversations in the interval—comprehending audiences of German adults and schoolchildren.
The global appetite for Shakespeare is the great acknowledged (but largely unsifted) fact of Shakespearean appreciation. Imagine translating Ben Jonson into Finnish. What would a Finnish audience make of, say, Bartholomew Fair? But it is an attested fact that Shakespeare substantially survives translation. Not without loss, of course. The poetry usually dies. One thinks with a smile and a shudder of the Dutch translation of Hamlet: “Omlet, Omlet, dies is dein Feyder's spooke.” But the human situations carry over, and grip audiences born into the target language in ways apparently not utterly dissimilar from those in which they have, for centuries, held English audiences. Recall, for instance, Kurosawa's transpositions of Shakespearean narratives into Japanese film. Try that with Every Man Out of His Humour.
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