ABSTRACT
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) must be the most successful of current world-wide appropriations of Shakespeare. It has certainly been so over the last three years in Mexico, where productions involving Shakespeare hardly ever run longer than a few months. However slim its artistic merits as yet another parodic take on the iconic value of the Bard, the implications of its world-wide popularity deserve attention. The success of the Reduced Shakespeare Company might suggest, for example, that Gary Taylor was right in prophesying the ‘shrinking of the bard’ (1999: 205). However, despite its healthy scepticism and playfulness, Taylor’s prophecy is somewhat unpersuasive. For a start, his assessment of Shakespeare’s ‘size’ focuses on ‘reputation’, a category that is appropriate to gauge little else but the shrinking of bardolatry. A fine day it will be when the immortal Bard finally goes out the window and theatre practitioners and academics relate more freely to the superb textual legacy of this mortal and refashionable playwright. And therein hangs a tale of more significant objections. A major one is that hardly any of the evidence Taylor provides stretches outside the English-speaking world. For all the reverence that he may command anywhere, it is precisely outside the Englishspeaking world that Shakespeare thrives from being in the company of many ‘others’ who perform and transform his texts – not only writers, directors and players but translators, dramaturgs and audiences.
