Shakespeare has been ever-present for centuries because of a peculiar quality of how the brand works, a quality that other brands can imitate.
Here are two weird things about Shakespeare. First, while some people love Shakespeare, others view reading or seeing the plays as a punishment from God. Second, you cannot escape references to Shakespeare—not just onstage or in high culture adaptations or when public speakers need to borrow a little authority. There are myriad other allusions, Hamlet cigars, beers like Shakespeare Stout and Falstaff Ale, an episode of Dr. Who, a sex shop called “Romeo and Juliets” in Telford, England, and thousands and thousands more.
This is this story of one low-culture reference to Shakespeare and how it says something bigger about Shakespeare, culture, and why we like the things we like.
If Disneyland and a brew pub had a love child it would be the McMenamin’s Edgefield property a few miles outside Portland in Troutdale, Oregon. At 74 acres, it’s a vast adult playground with restaurants, bars, concert venues, a hotel, spa, golf course, movie theater, and hot tubs—it’s kid and dog friendly, too.
On Friday, after enjoying a wander through the first true Spring day here in the Pacific Northwest (with a strange glowing ball of fire in the sky), La Profesora and I wound up at Edgefield for a quiet drink and some people watching. As one does after having a beer, I wandered into the restroom where I saw this:
For the half of the Dispatch readership unfamiliar with urinals, it’s an old-style, industrial pissoir (yep, that’s really the term), larger than today’s equivalents. What surprised me was the sign above the ceramic, which was decorative rather than about the restroom. The Marley Tile Company has been around for nearly a century in the U.K., specializing in roof tiles.
“Not for an age—but for all time” paraphrases a line in Ben Johnson’s dedicatory poem to his late friend William Shakespeare in the 1623 collection of Shakespeare’s plays that today we call the First Folio. This year, the First Folio celebrates its 400th birthday.
As many of you know, I’ve been obsessed with Shakespeare since I was a teen, got a Ph.D. in Shakespeare studies, gave a TEDx talk about Shakespeare as a business genius, and I’m writing a book about Shakespeare. My eyes are always watching, my ears always listening, for allusions to Shakespeare. There are a lot of them.
But I wasn’t expecting to run into Shakespeare above a urinal.
A marketing exercise.
Johnson’s actual line is “He was not of an age but for all time!” His poem links Shakespeare to great Classical playwrights (Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles) as well as to his contemporaries (Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe, Johnson himself). Today, centuries later, we accept Shakespeare’s timelessness as a given, but it was a new idea when Johnson wrote that line. He was reframing how book buyers should think about what (at the time) were somewhat old-fashioned plays by an author who had died seven years earlier.
Johnson’s poem, in other words, is marketing Shakespeare’s timelessness. There’s other aggressive marketing in the First Folio. The two editors, John Heminge and Henry Condell (fellow actors in Shakespeare’s company) write in their introduction that the previously available versions of the plays were pirated and poor copies:
Before, you were abused with diverse stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors… Those are now offered to your view, cured and perfect.
As Oxford’s Emma Smith has argued in a fascinating lecture about Henry V in her “Approaching Shakespeare” podcast:
What Heminge and Condell are getting at here is not an academic or neutral description of the provenance of different versions of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s a hard sell. We might paraphrase it as, “You’ve got half these plays already. So why would you pay a guinea for a new version? Answer: because the versions you’ve got aren’t the proper ones. You’ve been had. Here’s a chance to get authoritative copies.” It’s a selling technique that anticipates, for example, DVD rereleases, digital remasterings, director’s cuts, those kinds of things, as a way of selling essentially the same product by making out that the one you’ve already got is in some way lacking compared to the one which is now available.
It was such effective marketing of both the book and the Shakespeare brand that 300 years later one line shows up in an advertisement for roofing tiles, and a century after that a copy of that ad decorates a restroom in an Oregon pub.
The Marley ad is authentically Shakespearean.
The above-the-urinal ad is sophisticated because the reader doesn’t have to know the reference to Shakespeare to understand the ad’s selling proposition. However, if the reader does recognize the line, then that moment of recognition activates a comparison between the durability of roof tiles and a durable brand name (Shakespeare) that, at the time this ad first came out in the 1920s, had already lasted more than 300 years. Those are some sturdy tiles! The extra cognitive layer of the allusion to Shakespeare is optional but amplifying.
“Optional but amplifying” is why Shakespeare has lasted for centuries. Years ago, my friend Taylor joined me at the Jude Law Hamlet in New York. Taylor had never read or seen the play. She had a great time, and we had a long conversation afterward that wasn’t a “what did that mean?” Q&A session.
“Optional but amplifying” is inclusive rather than exclusive. It’s the opposite of the “if you know, you know” meme, fan service, Easter Eggs, and numberless references in shows like Family Guy that can alienate viewers who don’t have external context. It’s why Marvel movies are a harder sell today than they were when the first Iron Mancame out in 2008: newer viewers might not sign up for the homework assignment.
We like fielding references. It is pleasant to exercise expertise. What’s remarkable about Shakespeare is the many different roads we can take to arrive at that expertise, which is the subject of The Shakespeare Strategy.
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