Blackwell Reference Online

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Peter Brook, one of the leading theater directors of the age, has asserted: “the biography of Shakespeare doesn't matter one jot, it is only the plays that count” ( Gardner 2003 ). We would assert that the representations of the man matter considerably, reinforcing Shakespeare's cultural relevance and implicitly underpinning the continuous and ubiquitous performance of the plays. Academics have addressed the mutability of Shakespeare's works at great length; few have so far addressed the mutability of Shakespeare's image, a topic that has great current relevance (Hodgdon 1998; Lanier 2002b ; Taylor 1990 ). The shifting cultural values and multiculturalism characteristic of the twenty-first century render the meanings of Shakespeare more contested now than they have been since his establishment as the British national poet and icon in the eighteenth century. In Distinction (1984), his landmark study of French culture, Pierre Bourdieu argued for a strong correlation between class and taste; the rich and powerful consume cultural forms universally recognized as aesthetically superior to those consumed by the poor and powerless. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, legitimate art forms (literature, the theater, classical music, Western art) stood at the very top of stable cultural hierarchies to which all paid obeisance. But massively powerful and globalized culture ... log in or subscribe to read full text