The Hindu Business Line : Did the Bard have a head for business?

Normal businessmen may not have the Bard in their heads. Fine, but did he have a head for business? Yes, he did, say Janet Ware and Al Davis in `101 Things You Didn't Know about Shakespeare' from Viva (www.vivagroupindia.com) .

"In a day when the majority of theatre folk spent the bulk of their free time in taverns, Shakespeare was the consummate professional. He had a job - writing - and he seems to have taken it very seriously."

The authors study the Bard's creative output between 1587 and 1613 and say that `on average, he consistently wrote two, sometimes three, plays a year, for a quarter of a century'.

A search for `business' among Shakespeare's works yields more than 200 finds. Such as: "Our hands are full of business," in King Henry IV, and `a thousand businesses are brief in hand,' in King John. `To groan and sweat under the business,' was okay for Antony in Julius Caesar. "I must employ you in some business," insists Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream. And, in King Lear, Oswald announces, "My lady charged my duty in this business."

In Shakespeare's day, the only way a writer could make money was to be prolific, notes the book at hand. "This was a work-for-hire world, and the going rate was £4 per play." Payment was not for every staging of the play. "The acting company that purchased his play could stage it over and over without paying the author a single pound more - unless the playwright owned a share of the company."

Those were days of `no such things as royalties, copyrights, or residuals'. Nor was plagiarism a crime in Elizabethan England, so `other playwrights could even steal whole parts of his play'. It was a crime, though, `to be at odds with the prevailing political and religious climate'. A screening by the royal censors was a must before any play could go into production. Did Shakespeare's plays pass this test? Yes, always, because he was shrewd enough `to couch his opinions in mainstream language and themes' even when he wrote about `royalty and politics'.

How much money did he make? `About £200 per year from his writing,' informs the book. This was `considerably better-than-average living in turn-of-the-seventeenth-century England', one learns; `a workingman's survived on about £5 per year,' then.

Shakespeare's income was not solely from writing. He earned about £150 per year, `as a shareholder in his acting company'. Smart move, you'd agree. "He was apparently relentless about collecting debts owed to him," suggest Ware and Davis. "His name shows up on several tax registers and court documents related to financial disputes."

Perhaps, he practised what he wrote in Hamlet: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be. For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine ownself be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell... "

Well, there are a hundred other things to catch up with in the book!

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in