Inna’s Reviews > The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare > Status Update

Almost anywhere in the West, and by extension in India and other British colonies, Shakespeare has been seen as the classic par excellence. His work entered Japan, however, as shingeki or 'new drama'. Despite Shakespeare's antiquity and exemplary status, to the Japanese he belonged to the same reforming movement as Ibsen or Chekhov.

For Goethe, and particularly for Friedrich Schiller, Shakespeare was to become the basis for the development of a theatre that would engage German-speakers in the project of creating a nation. Paradoxically, it was Shakespeare's foreignness that made him useful: the lack of a Shakespearean history in Germany was the main attraction, allowing the romantic movement to recreate him as a visionary of freedom.

From the start of Shakespeare's afterlife as a dramatist two issues have been consistently present: claims for his universality and his appropriation into foreign environments.

Where Davenant and his peers had rewritten Shakespeare to keep him alive in the theatre as a contemporary playwright, Pope did so more discreetly to transform him into a polite Augustan poet, redeemed as far as could be managed from his degrading associations with the stage.

By 1900, the imitation of Shakespeare's language, except for the purpose of parody, was virtually over. Shakespeare's main influence, for much of the new century, would be on dramaturgy and theatrical space. The dramatist who had once been championed as a force for both poetic language and realistic psychology would now be invoked instead to justify non-mimetic theatre, Brechtian political drama, fluid staging, and a

The first Restoration adaptors approached Shakespeare much as Shakespeare had approached his predecessors, modernizing his language and complicating his plots.

This is not to see the plays, as some have done, as meta-drama, but to see them as meta-history. The plays are fundamentally about the difficulty of preserving the past.

Although many in Shakespeare's England were well aware of the ambiguities and contradictions surrounding the practice of history writing, history unquestionably existed for them as a significant cultural enterprise, and indeed it is in this period that 'history' begins to form as an academic discipline.

There was a general consensus that the past had meaning for the present, but less agreement about what this meaning was. History was sometimes recognized as a branch of theology, the record of God's providence, and sometimes it was seen as an exclusively secular concern, the record solely of human motives and actions.

Despite the economic advantages to married life, not all women or men wanted to marry. Adult women who, at any stage in their life, were unmarried composed 20 per cent of the north-west European population.