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Afterword: The incredible shrinking Bard

GARY TAYLOR

Size does matter.

Shakespeareans all know this. It matters that Shakespeare has been elected “Briton of the millennium,” that his works are studied by twenty million American schoolchildren every year, that Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet was the number one grossing film in America the weekend it opened, that Shakespeare in Love received more Academy Awards than any other 1998 film. Shakespeare accumulates superlatives: the greatest X, the most widely Y, the most often Z.

I come to measure Shakespeare, not to praise him, because I imagine myself as a cultural historian, not a cheerleader. Shakespeare’s reputation has a history (Taylor 1989; Bate 1998). More important, that history—however we tell it—is only one item in a much larger category. All reputations evolve; all reputations are subject to the mechanisms of biological and artificial memory, to the laws of stimulus, representation, and recollection (Taylor 1996). All reputations, even the most powerful, at some point begin to diminish. According to my measurements, Shakespeare’s reputation peaked in the reign of Queen Victoria, and is now shrinking.

This declaration will almost certainly be greeted, in many quarters, with snorts of derision and with a flood of counter-examples. “At the end of the twentieth century, Shakespeare is not retreating,

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