Episode 37 - Selling Shakespeare

Why is it so easy to buy trinkets and knick-knacks with the face of an English poet who's been dead for 400 years? More importantly, why are we so willing to buy them? Those questions are the crux of what we're getting to in this week's podcast: the Shakespeare economy.

We take a dive through the fundamental questions around selling art in the modern capitalist world: How do value art? Who benefits from selling it? From buying it? We also discuss the particularities of those questions around the long-dead Shakespeare.

Naturally we bring up Marvel & Disney, art vs. entertainment, and all sorts of other things as we wheel into this particular wheelhouse. Join us for a long but compelling conversation all about selling Shakespeare.

Ancient Bickerings:

Instead of a debate, this time we searched for three categories of items: the tackiest souvenir, the most expensive Shakespeare item, and the coolest ones.

Lindsay selected these particular items:

• Tackiest: Shakespeare Rubber Ducky OR Shakespeare Soap
• Most Expensive: A second folio edition
• Coolest: Any authentic pieces of the mulberry tree cut down in Shakespeare's backyard (couldn't actually find any)

Aidan went with:

• Tackiest: Shakespeare Punching Puppet OR Shakespeare Microbes
• Most Expensive: A 1709 Shakespeare Collected Works
• Coolest: Any of the tacky but otherwise cool masks for our day and time, such as those available on Etsy

Notes:

• The (very accurate) defense of Shakespeare in Love Lindsay mentions
• Aidan collected a great deal of material for this episode from Shakespeare's Cultural Capital, available as a PDF from Palgrave Macmillan
• You can read about the Globe and its reconstruction on both the Globe website itself, as well as Wikipedia
• Lindsay's questioning of airline pricing is based on a pretty solid breakdown of how COVID has wrecked the airline industry pricing practices