“A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country…” — Matthew 13:57

I think there’s something a bit Shakespearean about that idea.

Seven years ago, I was struck by the enthusiasm with which Shakespeare was being celebrated around the world — and by the rather less enthusiastic relationship we sometimes have with him here in Britain.

That really underlies my mission to demystify and democratise Shakespeare.

He belongs to us all. We’re entitled to him.

Yet we reject him, and confuse difficulty with elitism. 

I think Shakespeare would be baffled to hear that his works are not for ‘ordinary people’, given that a substantial part of his audience were neither royalty nor aristocracy, but ordinary Londoners paying a penny to stand in the yard.

I also think he’d be upset, angry, as I sometimes get, to be told his work is ‘boring‘ by people who have made their minds up without giving him a chance.

Writing the original post, you can see that I had more time on my hands than I do nowadays. The immediate prompt was a Reddit poll I conducted (a rigorously scientific methodology, naturally), but the question it raised was more serious: ‘why does Shakespeare sometimes seem to belong more comfortably to the rest of the world than to us?’

What can other countries see that we appear to be blind to?

Girdling the earth …

Maybe we have made him too British? We turn him into a national monument, an emblem of our cultural greatness, something to be revered, not read. And once a writer becomes a monument, it becomes remarkably easy to stop actually engaging with the writing. Familiarity breeds contempt, and all that …

The irony is that Shakespeare himself is far less interested in national borders than we are. His plays have travelled extraordinarily well because the things they explore — ambition, jealousy, desire, power, grief, revenge, foolishness — don’t belong to England. They belong to people. As I said earlier: to us all.

Seven years on, I think that’s still worth remembering.

Perhaps the prophet isn’t the problem. Perhaps it’s the country that has stopped listening.