PERSPECTIVES Economic & Political Weekly EPW March 21, 2015 vol L no 12 41 Branding Bill The Shakespearean Commons Pramod K Nayar Pramod K Nayar (pramodknayar@gmail.com) is with the University of Hyderabad. Situating William Shakespeare within the study of brands, this article examines the process and results of Shakespeare-as-brand, which mediates the supply and demand of Shakespearean products whether about his life, his loves, his texts, his editors, and his readers or consumers. Shakespeare as a commons continues to gather cultural capital because of the iterability of the brand in mass/popular forms and media that now possess the maximum cultural legibility (like the graphic novel or Hollywood romance). This is possible even more in the digital age because the Shakespearean page, stage, and image are all available simultaneously on a screen, making Shakespeare an interactive, global archive. A year ago, the world celebrated William Shakespeare’s 450th birth- day. But this essay has little to do with Shakespeare’s plays, or Shake- speare scholarship. It situates Shake- speare within what may be broadly characterised as “brand studies.” Adapt- ing the work of semioticians of brands and retail, Celia Lury, John Frow, and others, the article examines the process and results of “branding Bill,” or Shake- speare-as-brand. Shakespeare-as-brand mediates the supply and demand of Shakespearean products through the organisation, coordination, and integra- tion of the use of information — whether about his life, his loves, his texts, his edi- tors, and his readers/consumers. John Heminges’ and Henry Condell’s First Folio (1623); Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt’s New York Times bestseller Will in the World: How Shake- speare Became Shakespeare (2004); Sam- uel Johnson–Samuel Coleridge–Matthew Arnold writing prefaces to Shakespeare; 20th century manga versions; video games; university syllabi; Baz Luhrmann- Kenneth Branagh–Akira Kurosawa films; mysteries around the “dark lady” and authorship; and something we have come to know as the “plays of William Shakespeare” — the inventory is trans- medial, multigeneric. Shakespeare func- tions here as something separated from the quality of his works, as a brand whose value is recognisable in numerous forms that may or may not have any- thing to do with the notion of literary value. Shakespeare as sign, as an icon, possesses, therefore, unimaginable sema- ntic autonomy from his works, or even from English and England. Lanier summarises Shakespeare’s popular avatars, In culture generally, but certainly in popular culture, the name and image of ‘Shakespeare’ has become a byword for a set of qualities that have been attached to an astonishing variety of texts and products — bank cards, £20 notes (from 1970–93), beer, crockery, fishing tackle, book publishing, cigars, pubs, and breath mints, to name a few. ‘Shake- speare’ has come to serve as an adjective, a tool potentially for reshaping the associa- tions of objects that become linked with his name (2007: 93). Lanier treats Shakespeare as a brand, and goes on to term him the “Coca-Cola of canonical culture” (p 93). This also means that there is Shakespeare as information running wild. An immediate objection that could be raised here — and one voiced by Rum- bold in her essay on “Brand Shake- speare” in 2011 — is that the brand im- age is a corporate effort, the signature of a company (as opposed to the signature of an individual, as Frow argued in 2002). Rumbold argues that while Sha- kespeare might “enact some of the legiti- mating functions of the brand, it is not quite the same as being a trademark” (2011: 26), and we need to see the brand- ing of Shakespeare as “retrospectively constructed.” But Rumbold concedes that this brand effect is more about the symbolic function of Shakespeare in the marketplace. My contention is that the temporality — when does Shakespeare become a brand — is less significant than the reach of the symbolic and cultural value of the commodity we have come to identify as Shakespeare. This “reach” also means that brand Shakespeare is co-pro- duced rather than corporate controlled, by users, readers, and non-specialists, in multiple domains and genres. We thus need to move beyond think- ing of brands as only corporate pro- duced. Shakespeare the brand does not pre-exist his “commercial deployment,” says Rumbold (2011: 27) — but surely it would be severely restrictive to say that it is only in the marketplace that Shake- speare-as-brand is produced. I suggest towards the end of the essay that it is vernacular creativity and everydayness that enables Bill to be branded, for reinforcing the brand magic and build- ing what I shall irreverently call the “Shakespearean commons.”