ABSTRACT
Shakespeare has made the big time. No less than the Beatles or Liberace, Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger, Shakespeare is big-time in the idiomatic sense of cultural success, high visibility, and notoriety. Other literary figures may achieve canonical status within the academic community based on claims to artistic distinction, but Shakespeare is unusual in that he has also achieved contemporary celebrity. Such an achievement entails an aptitude for controversy that keeps Shakespeare’s name above a certain threshold of public attention. Notwithstanding a long history of challenges to his cultural authority, Shakespeare has been a celebrity for just about as long as the social state of being a celebrity has existed. Other stars of the culture industry-David Garrick, let’s say, or, to choose a more properly literary example, Lord Byron-have had nothing like Shakespeare’s durability. Such extraordinary cultural stamina will be the primary focus of this book. When he was still alive, Shakespeare was not much of a public figure. He seems to have avoided publicity, and as far as anyone knows, preferred a relatively modest and retiring existence. On the other hand, the evidence of the Sonnets suggests that Shakespeare had hoped for and expected considerable public renown for his poetry, though there is a perhaps naïve insistence here on the genuine worthiness of his performance as the main reason for his fame. In Sonnet 65 Shakespeare writes of the ‘miracle’ of ‘black ink’ as the solution to the problem of ‘sad mortality’ and suggests that his ‘powerful rhyme’ can outlive ‘marble and the gilded monuments of Princes’. As a private aspiration, fame is simply a wish to be remembered after one is dead. But in the traditional understanding of fame it clearly matters exactly what one hopes to be famous for. Fame, in the sense
intended in Shakespeare’s sonnets, is the consequence of virtuous acts and exemplary achievements. From the perspective of the community, the moral dignity achieved by famous people through their famous deeds enhances the cohesion of society over time.
