This year’s 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare is not just an opportunity to commemorate one of the greatest playwrights of all time. It is a moment to celebrate the extraordinary ongoing influence of a man who — to borrow from his own description of Julius Caesar — “doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”
Shakespeare’s legacy is without parallel: His works have been translated into more than 100 languages and are studied by half the world’s schoolchildren. As one of his contemporaries, British playwright Ben Jonson said: “Shakespeare is not of an age, but for all time.” He lives today in our language, our culture and society — and through his enduring influence on education.
Shakespeare played a critical role in shaping modern English and helping to make it the world’s language. The first major dictionary compiled by English man of letters Samuel Johnson drew on Shakespeare more than any other writer. Three thousand new words and phrases all first appeared in print in Shakespeare’s plays.
I remember from my own childhood how many of them are found for the first time in Henry V. Words such as dishearten, divest, addiction, motionless, leapfrog — and phrases such as “once more unto the breach,” “band of brothers” and “heart of gold” — have all passed into English today with no need to reference their original context. Shakespeare also pioneered innovative use of grammatical form and structure — including verse without rhymes, superlatives and the connecting of existing words to make new words, like bloodstained — while the pre-eminence of his plays also did much to standardize spelling and grammar.
However, Shakespeare’s influence is felt far beyond our language. His words, plots and characters continue to inspire much of our culture and wider society. Former South African president Nelson Mandela, while a prisoner on Robben Island, cherished a quote from Julius Caesar which said: “Cowards die many times before their death, the valiant never taste of death but once.”
While English poet Kate Tempest’s poem My Shakespeare captures the eternal presence of Shakespeare when she wrote that Shakespeare “is in every lover who ever stood alone beneath a window … every jealous whispered word and every ghost that will not rest.”
Shakespeare’s influence is everywhere, from writers Charles Dickens and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to composers Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Giuseppe Verdi and Johannes Brahms; from West Side Story to the Hamlet-inspired title of Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap — the longest-running theater production in London’s West End today. While his original plays continue to entertain millions — from school halls across the world to the overnight queues as hundreds scrambled for last minute tickets to see Benedict Cumberbatch playing Hamlet at London’s Barbican last year.
However, perhaps one of the most exciting legacies of Shakespeare is his capacity to educate. As we see from the outreach work of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe and the impact of pioneering British charities like the Shakespeare Schools Festival, studying and performing Shakespeare can help improve literacy, confidence and wider educational attainment.
So today — Twelfth Night — and every day throughout this year, Britain is inviting you to join us in celebrating the life and legacy of William Shakespeare. Today we are launching “Shakespeare Lives” — an exciting global program of activity and events to highlight his enduring influence and extend the use of Shakespeare as an educational resource to advance literacy around the world.
The program is to run in more than 70 countries, led by the British Council and the GREAT Britain campaign. You can share your favorite moment of Shakespeare on social media, watch never-before-seen performances on stage, film and online, visit exhibitions, take part in workshops and debates and access new Shakespearean educational resources to get to grips with the English language.
The Royal Shakespeare Company is to tour China; Shakespeare’s Globe is to perform across the world from Iraq to Denmark. Young people are set to reimagine Shakespeare in Zimbabwe. A social media campaign called “Play your Part” (#PlayYourPart) is to invite the next generation of creative talent to produce their own digital tribute to the bard — and, in partnership with the British charity Voluntary Services Overseas, we are to raise awareness of the huge challenge of global child illiteracy and use Shakespeare to increase educational opportunities for children around the world.
Beyond the great gift of language, the bringing to life of our history, his ongoing influence on our culture and his ability to educate, there is just the immense power of Shakespeare to inspire. From the most famous love story to the greatest tragedy; from the most powerful fantasy to the wittiest comedy; and from the most memorable speeches to his many legendary characters, in William Shakespeare we have one man, whose vast imagination, boundless creativity and instinct for humanity encompasses the whole of the human experience as no one has before or since.
So, however you choose to play your part, please join us this year in this unique opportunity to celebrate the life and enduring legacy of this man; ensuring that, as he himself put it, “all the world’s a stage” and that through his legacy, truly, Shakespeare Lives.
David Cameron is the British prime minister.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS