William Shakespeare feels like our contemporary. We expect a theatre production or a film of a Shakespeare play not only to transport us back to a past world but also to speak to us now. We respond to his plays by relating them to our lives today, whether by seeing our own tangled relationships played out before us or by recognising in a Shakespeare character a politician from the headlines of the moment.

Remarkably, this sense of Shakespeare as ours, in our here and now, appears to be shared almost universally. In Japan and in Africa, in Germany and in China, young teenagers and people well into their third (or seventh) age appropriate Shakespeare's plays as mirrors of their own concerns.

Why do the dramas of Shakespeare occupy this privileged position, and not those written by his contemporaries or successors? One simple response is that his dramatic and poetic output was richer, more extensive and more varied. Scholars disagree about the degree of collaboration on certain texts, but 38 or so plays have come down to us, representing an extraordinary range and mixture of genres, including classical comedy, romance, historical epic and tragedy. Such dramatic variety invites audiences and readers of all ages and of both sexes.

Shakespeare has become a cultural icon and British export. The history of his reception includes the making of the Shakespearean myth in the eighteenth century, with the beginning of the scholarly editorial tradition and David Garrick's elevation of the Bard, to the entry of Shakespeare into the British school and examination system in the 1850s and the subsequent global dissemination of the plays within an imperial culture. The Shakespeare of this process was identified (as for some he still is) with the age of Elizabeth I, which the nation and empire could believe was an earlier moment of confidence and achievement.

In the British theatre, Shakespeare's plays have been more or less continuously performed. They offer superb vehicles for actors, and indeed Shakespeare has come to be the yardstick by which actors and directors are judged. Kenneth Branagh's recent Richard III for the stage is compared to those of Laurence Olivier and Antony Sher. A new Hamlet or Lear performance is similarly measured against the great actors of the past: Olivier, Gielgud, and the line going back through Irving to Edmund Kean, Garrick and beyond. Womens' parts, though generally shorter (they were originally all played by boys, who were younger and had less stamina than mature actors) demand equal skill and emotional range: from Juliet, to Rosalind, Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra--not to mention the fiery old Queen Margaret who brings down curses on Richard III.

Today, in many more languages than English, Shakespeare is studied and performed and appreciated. Liberation through translation from the original text is often exciting, for a production in German or Yoruba rarely feels the need, still sometimes felt in Britain, to respect an Elizabethan context and eccentric costumes. Shakespeare's scripts, written for a bare Elizabethan stage with scant scenery, nevertheless adapt happily to film, which nowadays is the medium through which many people first encounter them.

Shakespeare was a dramatist and dramatic poet, even in the Sonnets. His characters express countless and contradictory viewpoints rather than his own. His writings have been harnessed and adapted (into novels as well as plays) to suit the preoccupations of people of all political persuasions and cultures. Yet a sense of a shared Shakespeare culture remains, widely referred to in literature, commerce and ordinary life, held in common much as the Bible and the classical world would have been to his own audience, both high and low.

Shakespeare and the academy
If we turn to the study of Shakespeare in the academy, we can see how Shakespeare's plays and poems have been subjected to a variety of critical approaches: psychoanalytic, linguistic, structuralist, historicist and materialist. Certain key topics have emerged as important for Shakespeare studies, perhaps most obviously race and colonialism, gender and sexuality. History has become an increasingly vital interest of the Shakespearean critic, relating the plays ever more precisely to the unstable social and political world around 1600.

The study of texts and textual practice, of how the plays have come down to us from the early printed quartos and the First Folio edition of 1623, has re-emerged as a vital concern in the last 20 years. Scholars have come to recognise, sometimes reluctantly, that there is no original manuscript of any of the plays, and that the contingent practices of the theatre, of when and where versions of the plays were performed, and of how they were transformed in the printing houses, is crucial to our knowledge of the texts.

Playhouse practice--rehearsals and training, apprenticeships and costumes--has also been increasingly recognised as significant for Shakespeare studies. Whilst there is only scant documentary evidence relating to these questions, the excavations of the foundations of the Rose Theatre in London in 1989 and the construction of the replica Globe Theatre in the following decade, have had an enormous impact. Shakespeare in Love, too, reflected much of this interest and in turn contributed to a developing awareness beyond an audience of specialists of the practicalities and the opportunism of the Elizabethan theatre.

Examples of these approaches, from many distinguished scholars, are included in this new Fathom Learning Center about Shakespeare and his World. There are free seminars, features, reference material, recommended books and links to the rich and occasionally bizarre world of Shakespeare online.

There is much here to enjoy and to learn from, about Shakespeare's life and his plays, about the complex beauty and mysteries of his poems, and about the worlds of Elizabethan England and of the European Renaissance. There is much too to send you back with a deeper understanding and an enhanced appreciation, to Shakespeare's words, and to their living forms on stage and on screen.

Sarah Stanton
Publishing Director
Shakespeare Editor
Cambridge University Press