Brush up your Shakespeare

‘William Shakespeare was the most influential person who ever lived,’ is the audacious opening line of Canadian writer Stephen Marche’s recently published book, How Shakespeare Changed Everything. It’s the sort of bold claim that makes you immediately think of other contenders: Jesus? Muhammed? Newton? Freud? Oprah? And while we’re at it, how exactly should influence be measured? Is it counted in literary references and Google hits — or is it something less tangible, more magical than that?

Marche suggests the latter but conveniently skips over the criteria for determining his thesis. As far as the author is concerned it’s obvious that all of history’s luminaries are pretty dull compared to Stratford’s son, who, he writes rather ecstatically, ‘makes the world shiver’ and ‘everyday things vibrate’. Marche himself chose Shakespeare as the subject of his PhD, and later as teaching material as a professor of Renaissance drama at the City College of New York, because he hoped Shakespeare would never bore him.

And as his book attests, he was right.

No doubt Oxbridge scholars beavering away in the dusty corners of English literature will balk at the idea that they can need a lesson in Shakespeare appreciation by an enthusiastic Canuck. But perhaps sometimes it takes a keen outsider to brush away the layers of fashionable restraint. Marche rushes in where Angles sometimes fear to tread, and shows how the magic of Shakespeare infuses all of our daily lives, whether we care to see it or not.

There are, of course, many obvious reasons why the Bard deserves such homage. He perfected, if not entirely invented, narrative conventions seen everywhere from the Hollywood schlockbuster to the most rarified literary novel. He was as much a master of the sharp and scintillating insight (‘Action is eloquence’) as he was of the dirty joke (‘O Romeo, that she were an open-arse, and thou a popp’rin pear’).