Not a brand…

In recent years, the notion of ‘the Shakespeare brand’ has provided scholars with a ready metaphor to describe Shakespeare's remarkable cultural and commercial purchase in the twenty-first century. Doug Lanier has titled Shakespeare ‘the Coca-Cola of canonical culture’, and critics have explored the deployment of ‘the Shakespeare brand’ from the production of eighteenth-century editions to the marketing of twentieth-century screen adaptations of his plays. Most recently, ‘Deploying the Shakespeare Brand’ was the topic of a lively seminar at the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2010, that explored the commercial presence of ‘Shakespeare’ in, among other things, cartoons, crafts and film.

In many ways, ‘brand’ is a helpful term with which to understand Shakespeare's cultural purchase. With it, scholars can acknowledge that ‘Shakespeare’ has a symbolic function in the world quite separate from (if partly rooted in) the facts of his existence and the content of his plays. The range of associations ‘Shakespeare’ bears – from excellence to Englishness – can be deployed in new, profitable, ways. That his image graces ‘bank cards, £20 notes (from 1970–93), beer, crockery, fishing tackle, book publishing, cigars, pubs, and breath mints’ is a familiar trope of reception studies. As critics have observed, too, ‘Shakespeare’, like any successful brand name, is attached to a seemingly endless series of new products, from stage and film adaptations to souvenir money-boxes, medallions and tea-towels, and even the dizzying realms of ironic, academic kitsch – ‘the Shakespeare beanie baby, the Shakespeare bobble-head, the Shakespeare action figure, or the Shakespeare celebriduck (a rubber bath duck adorned with the face of Shakespeare)’. ‘Brand’ provides space for scholars to consider the meanings and values that Shakespeare brings to, and accrues in, these new settings. ‘The Shakespeare brand’ extends the opportunity, too, for scholars to reflect on Shakespeare's unusual leverage – for good or ill – in academic publishing, employment and student recruitment.