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How Shakespeare Changed Everything

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We have often heard that Shakespeare has influenced our language, literature and culture. In "How Shakespeare Changed Everything" author Stephen Marche treats the reader to a light hearted, easy to read explanation of how Shakespeare really did change it all. He explains some of the numerous quotes that enrich our every day speech. Chapter by chapter Marche examines how Shakespeare confronted racial and religious bigotry, altered our sexual mores, may have inspired John Wilkes Booth and NAZIs, and how a tribute to Shakespeare gone bad created an ecological disruption across America, along with other topics. He compares different versions of the plays to show the difficulty in ascertaining just what Shakespeare actually wrote. At the end he delves into the controversy over whether William Shakespeare of Stratford could really have written the fabulous canon of work attributed to him.

For me, who has a moderate familiarity with Shakespeare, this book opened new doors of inquiry and led me down unexplored paths. I enjoyed this book and it has whetted my appetite to learn more about the Bard of Stratford. That makes it a worthwhile read.

Bardolatry, or idolising Shakespeare, takes on many shapes and forms. From Harold Bloom - the ultimate self-confessed secular bardolator - attributing him the "invention of the human," to the myriad of pseudo-religious deifications of the man, we have seen it all. Stephen Marche is also a bardolator, of a more pedestrian kind if you may. In this enjoyable lightweight book, he sets out to show us Shakespeare's presence in all that surrounds us: It is a bit of a stretch, and he seems to be aware of it. Since I am a bardolator, and I want everyone to realise how extraordinary, universal and enduring Shakespeare's body of work is, I welcome this book. It helps the cause.

I have not read this book am not likely to do so for the simple reason that the author is grossly negligent of the historical context of his own writing. Here are his recent comments, posted all over the internet, on the Shakespearean authorship controversy:

You know, for serious scholars, that's not a very interesting topic.
It's like talking with an astronaut about whether the moon landing was
faked. It's a conspiracy theory, and it's kind of irritating that it
keeps cropping up. No one has ever been given a Ph.D. who believed
Shakespeare wasn't the author of the plays. There are certainly some
very serious people who think Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare, including
Sigmund Freud and Justice [John] Stevens. But among real scholars, the
debate just doesn't exist.

Whether or not Mr. Marche want it to or not the debate does exist "among real scholars." As editor of Brief Chronicles, a peer reviewed journal of interdisciplinary studies, which counts around a dozen tenured faculty in relevant humanities disciplines on its editorial board, I can attest to Marche's astounding ignorance of this topic.

O, and by the way, I was given a University of Massachusetts PhD not only believing that "Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare" -- as Marche so eloquently puts -- but adding a substantial body of new evidence to the case that the real author was in fact, as Freud knew nearly a hundred years ago, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604).

I would have been very interested in Marche's book. He's right. Shakespeare did change everything. And he's about to change a whole lot more -- its a pity that Marche is so clueless about that.