Commemorating Shakespeare(s) across the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States and France from the eighteenth- to the twenty-first centuries

Abstract

ABSTRACT Commemorations of William Shakespeare have always been multimedial ideological constructs with particular aims and purposes in different cultures and contexts at different times. Shakespeare commemorations have been instrumental in the creation of the cultural capital that is attached to Shakespeare today. This essay traces some significant Shakespeare commemorations since the eighteenth century, beginning with David Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769. From the commemorations of 1864, the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth, it goes on to trace Shakespeare commemorations particularly in the United Kingdom and Germany in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, after World War II, Shakespeare commemorations became ever more globalised in a world dominated by the Cold War and the Western hegemony of the anglosphere, in particular the USA. With its split in 1963, just before the quadricentenary, the German Shakespeare Society followed the split of Germany on the frontier between the Western and Eastern political blocks. After the end of the Cold War, the Shakespeare cult and industry of the 21st century instigate even more globalised commemorations that compete with each other and that arguably result, for instance at the 450th anniversary in 2014, in an excess of commemorations, both in academia and in popular culture.