Shakespeare ‘first great writer entrepreneur’
A self indulgent “And finally this week…” I went to see the Tempest at the Globe on Friday. I go as a treat once a year. For those who are fascinated by the bard the soliloquy at the end by Prospero brings a tear to the eye. It is a thinly veiled cover for Shakespeare himself recognising his own declining faculties saying goodbye. Roger Allan (Thursday in “Endeavour” on TV) was brilliant in the role.
Shakespeare set many of our ideas of what rural England means in train. No-one since has been able to describe it like him. Witness the pastoral scenes in another great last series play of his “The Winters Tale”
In addition to coming from the Forest of Arden himself he exhibited much of the entrepreneurial skills many rural folk have which underpin the current dynamism surrounding many interesting approaches to alternative service delivery. A theme I am currently researching for Defra.
Here is academic proof of his transfer of such skills to the world of the play-write setting a new trend for the profession itself. The article tells us:
William Shakespeare was the first great “writer entrepreneur” and his financial success gave him artistic independence, an Oxford University researcher claims.
Dr Bart van Es says the turning point for Shakespeare’s writing career was when he became a shareholder in a theatre company.
It meant that he had much more control over his plays than other writers. “This separated Shakespeare from the world of the jobbing playwright,” says Dr van Es. In 1594, Shakespeare bought a share in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men theatre company, which Dr van Es describes as a “daring decision”.
It was an unprecedented step for an Elizabethan author to take a stake in the ownership of of a theatre company and it put Shakespeare in a “unique position”, compared with his literary contemporaries, claims Dr van Es, from Oxford’s faculty of language and literature.
It made Shakespeare much richer, but it also gave him much more freedom over his writing and allowed him to innovate