In the beginning—which for the West was always in Greece, or Gilgamesh—the arts were all about myth, but across the millennia, even as their achievements were shared and disseminated across the world, their subject-matter dwindled into the merely historical, empirical, and local. One of our names for the imagined happy midpoint in that process—whether we view it as a fortunate fall or a tragic one—is Shakespeare. The story of the long downward mobility of Western literature, from the classical age to modernity—a story perhaps most influentially set out in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946)—has itself become part of the mythology underpinning modern literary studies, and it remains such an important underlying part of the mental equipment by which Western scholars imagine Shakespeare’s place in the history of human culture that it is worth bringing it to consciousness here, as a starting place for a brief consideration of how and why Shakespeare should have come to play the multiple roles explored in this volume: as mythologizer and mythologized; as reviser, generator, and subject of myths.

To summarize the Auerbachian narrative, then: once upon a classical time seers and prophets wrote about the doings of the gods, and then epic poets wrote about heroes; then medieval chroniclers wrote about kings, and romancers about knights errant; and then Cervantes laughingly disenchanted the chivalric tradition in such a way as to turn it into the origins of the realist novel, which down the nineteenth and twentieth centuries went from exploring the lives of the European haute bourgeoisie to narrating the misadventures of Scottish drug addicts. (Auerbach himself, of course, was spared Irvine Welsh, his examples of quotidian modern particularity stopping at Proust and Woolf). The theater, similarly, descended from presenting the divinities and sacrificial monarchs of Greek tragedy to showing the bustling kings and merchant princes of the Renaissance, and thence on down to Monsieur Jourdain and all the other bourgeois gentilshommes who people Enlightenment social comedy. In the early twentieth century the wicked Sir Jaspers of Victorian melodrama gave place to the second Mrs Tanqueray and her shabby-genteel Chekhovian cousins, until even they were banished after World War II in favor of Beckett’s tramps and Pinter’s caretaker. In this scheme of things, Shakespeare flourished at a midway stage of civilization nicely poised between the primitive and the degenerate, his works still able to reach back to the gods and archetypes of Greece and Rome while already able to mingle or alternate them with the quasi-documentary, proto-Welshian street realism of Elizabethan city comedy.

Wonderfully particular and nuanced in their modes of relating to themselves and one another through language—which confers on them a lasting and flexible illusion of interiority—Shakespeare’s characters are thus still able to retain the same useful and productive ontological vagueness enjoyed by Job, Oedipus, or Dido. Written for a stage which retained the cosmological overtones of its medieval forebears—a stage on which every character is always implicitly an Everyman or Everywoman, precariously placed between the heavens above and hell beneath—Shakespeare’s plays tend to be not-quite set in either a particular place or a particular time, more committed to the present tense of their own performance than to the nominal times of their events. Even a chronicle-based play like Macbeth is not exactly a psychological study about how Scottish usurpers felt and behaved during the eleventh century (though subsequent realist, historicist theater artists have been able to treat it as such), but it is not exactly a pure and abstract morality play either (though expressionists have tried that too). The plays’ resultant availability for translation into other media, other places and other times—and for their concomitant appropriation as myth, both locally and globally—is only reinforced by Shakespeare’s own humanist investment in the myths he learned at school, both Christian and classical. He not only carries out Ovidian metamorphoses of his own on established myths (whether of Venus and Adonis, in Venus and Adonis, or of Pygmalion, in The Winter’s Tale, or of Diana and Actaeon, repeatedly), but, always depicting characters in a process of mutual change and becoming, he habitually incorporates versions of Ovidian metamorphosis itself into his drama. (The most pervasive across the canon is the Elizabethan theater’s everyday version of gender transformation, the cross-dressing of a boy actor as a woman as a boy.) Just as Shakespeare treats earlier myths, so his plays go on getting repeated and adapted and interpreted and revised: it is a process which they themselves model. They ask for it.

If anything, Auerbach himself occludes some of this by choosing Henry IV parts 1 and 2 as his Shakespearean example, which includes one of the few moments even among the histories when a character mentions a particular date (in so far as the king’s reference to the Crucifixion taking place “fourteen hundred years ago,” 1.1.26, quite does). Choosing the secular world of the Henriad as a sample of Shakespeare’s version of realism won’t quite give the same sense of his hospitality to the mythic as would, say, picking A Midsummer Night’s Dream (though elsewhere in the comedies we may find ourselves in a much more everyday wood, in Windsor Park, where the myth of Herne the Hunter is only there to be burlesqued and the Queen of the Fairies is just Mistress Quickly dressed up). It might have been fairer to single out a rather different but no less typically Shakespearean variation on other material drawn from Holinshed, Cymbeline, which incorporates modern Italians, but in which Jupiter descends on an eagle nonetheless. In fact, picking out Henry IV as a milestone on a one-way journey from myth to history is misleading anyway, since although, over the longue durée time of classical, medieval, Enlightenment, and modern, myth may on the whole give place to history, more locally history is perpetually being misremembered as myth, or at the very least deliberately turned into it. Henry V might provide a more representative example here: a play which is itself a hybrid between the mythographic account of Agincourt offered in the speeches of the Chorus and the more realist proto-war-movie constituted by the intervening scenes, scenes which show the contingent and questionable events of Henry’s campaign being transformed into the stuff of heroic legend even as they are happening. When Laurence Olivier’s son Richard further reprocesses this play to form part of his pseudo-Jungian “Olivier Mythodrama” program of inspirational leadership workshops for executives, he too is only carrying on in one direction already indicated within the play’s text.Footnote 1

There is one major external, post-Shakespearean factor which in different ways informs all of the examples discussed in this volume: Shakespeare’s status as the first modern author to have entered the domain of world literature (a domain, sadly, which is itself looking wistfully mythical as individual territories all around the world, including the area once inhabited by Shakespeare, re-embrace forms of irredentism and isolationism). Largely unconcerned with any obvious nationalist agenda of his own (if he himself even had a recognizable single national identity in the first place, living as he did across the reigns of an Anglo-Welsh queen of England and the Scottish king of a Britain which didn’t quite exist yet), Shakespeare, outside the histories, was perfectly happy to dramatize stories of France, Italy, Rome, Vienna, Greece, Denmark, or Tyre, and it is the paradoxical conjunction of his own indifferent cosmopolitanism and his exploitation by Anglophone imperialists (not to mention German imperialists, and Russian imperialists, and all sorts of other nationalists elsewhere) which has helped make his works an officially common cultural possession across much of the world’s surface. Too big to fail, Shakespeare’s cross-cultural currency is also too big not to be mythologized, whether ideologically (as in the instances discussed by Marcela Kostihova and by Frank Widar Brevik, in which Shakespeare often figures an imagined unalienated creative authenticity miraculously immune from the market conditions under which his work is reproduced) or internationally. As Bettina Boecker points out, part of the Shakespeare myth is the notion that the plays, because translated successfully into so many different languages, must somehow transcend all of them, indeed must be equally and equivalently comprehensible to all spectators even when performed in a medley of sundry languages in which no single auditor is actually fluent. The myth of the intercultural transparency of Shakespeare is tackled in a different register by Kevin A. Quarmby in the case of Yohangza’s Hamlet, a production which uses Shakespeare’s willingness to retell a Scandinavian ghost story as the pretext for the retrospective invention of a shamanic Korean cultural heritage of which many Koreans are so far wholly ignorant. If Yohangza turns the historical specifics of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into a would-be mythic instance of Korean shamanism, however, other instances discussed here work in the opposite direction, finding realist localities and social contexts in which to reproduce the stories which Shakespeare left so availably unfixed, whether in the case of Hamlet in Brazil (as investigated by Anna Stegh Camati) or King Lear in recent international cinema (as explored by Kinga Földváry). You can distill or abstract a play into a myth, but you can also localize a mythicized play in order to harness it back into being a usable story.

Filmed or not, Shakespeare still belongs in large part to the artform in which he himself worked, the live theater, and because much of the work of Shakespearean actors and directors consists in channeling and embodying Shakespearean pathos, histories of the Shakespearean theater are especially liable to be distorted by the enthusiasts who write them into the perpetuation of sentimental myths. (Nobody before Garrick/Kean/Irving/Olivier/Branagh ever made Shakespeare’s tragic characters seem empathetically real; the only satisfactory Lady Macbeth ever was Sarah Siddons/Ellen Terry/Sarah Bernhardt/Judi Dench; all methods of staging Shakespeare were false and artificial and anachronistic before those of J.R.Planché/the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen/William Poel/Tyrone Guthrie/Peter Brook/Deborah Warner.) One of these theater-historical myths is multiply debunked in the pages of this volume by a combined assault from Emily Oliver, Saffron Vickers Walkling, Aleksandra Sakowska, and Alexandra Portmann, namely the myth that all productions of Shakespeare in the former Eastern Bloc were urgently political, offering subversive glimpses of liberation to otherwise uniformly oppressed audiences. The romantic dream that on the other side of the Berlin Wall the performance of Shakespeare mattered in a controversial, active, social way which we in the repressively tolerant West had sadly lost was, it transpires, almost entirely based on one book by Jan Kott as promulgated by Peter Brook. It is one of the incidental achievements of this book to open up the accomplishments of Shakespearean directors and actors in Eastern Europe to interpretations which go beyond a simple dichotomy between the quietist and the dissident. Another is to expose some of the sub-myths by which Shakespeare enters different national cultures, and sometimes by which that entry is itself subsequently mythologized, processes explored here by Ryuta Minami, Dan Venning, and Benedict Schofield.

But is entirely debunking the Shakespeare myth possible, at this stage in its history? Is it necessarily even desirable? As most of the chapters in this volume attest, myth has its tactical uses, across a wide range of geographical and artistic contexts. In the Anglophone world, where cultural capital is itself being devalued by populist regimes keen to assert their independence from educated elites, stripping away what perceived timeless magic may still adhere to a name that remains the world’s favorite shorthand for the transcendent value of the arts might seem a rash thing for educators to do. If in the 1980s producing minute critiques of the ideological underpinnings of Bardolatry looked like one important way in which literary and cultural critics might assert the independence of academic analysis from mass marketing and state-backed mystification, nowadays it might look more like biting the hands which, via taxes invested in national education systems, donations to the Folger, and admission fees handed over to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, still feed the Shakespeare cult’s paid-up intellectuals. In the twenty-first century, disrespecting the Shakespeare myth, with whatever scrupulous critical judgment and accuracy, is in imminent danger of helping to saw off the branch on which the humanities themselves are ever more precariously perched.

In practice, though, the debunking of Shakespeare and the venerating of Shakespeare alike seem continuous with Shakespeare’s own turn of mind, which produced history plays which simultaneously uphold monarchy and reveal its bankruptcy, and which in Edmund and Edgar in King Lear produced characters whose skepticism and whose delight in parodying the discourses of astrology and exorcism respectively seem to demythologize the notion of demythologization itself. Certainly the myth-making and myth-revising habits of Shakespeare’s writing continue to inform accounts of his life and career, as I have argued elsewhere (Dobson 2013, 2015). The public survival of a mythic Shakespeare, indeed, was made spectacularly visible all around the world in 2016—a year marked by multiple festive celebrations of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the concomitant birth of his posthumous fame.Footnote 2 To close with a text from the very inception of the dead poet’s mythology, then, let us turn briefly to Shakespeare’s epitaph:

IVDICIO PYLIVM, GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE MARONEM,

TERRA TEGIT, POPVLVS MÆRET, OLYMPVS HABET.

According to whoever composed these lines, another fortunately situated Renaissance poet able to reach effortlessly back to the classical pantheon even while gesturing toward the future, Shakespeare had the judgment of Nestor, the intellectual genius of Socrates, and the literary skill of Virgil, and, now covered by the earth and mourned by the public, he belongs forever on Mount Olympus. As many commentators have wondered, didn’t this blundering provincial Holofernes or whoever it was really mean Mount Parnassus, the home of the muses? I myself think not. Putting the realistic Mr William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon up there alongside Jupiter and the rest of the gods seems much more in keeping with his own creative habits. Parnassus is just literature. Shakespeare, whether he reaches its realm by reaching backwards into the classical past or forwards into our times and beyond, is a matter of myth.