Shakescorp Noir

The final years of the twentieth century have seen a curious and, to my mind, telling phenomenon in the realm of Shakespeare and pop culture, one that provides an illuminating context for certain elements of the much-ballyhooed Shakespeare film boom of the '90s. It is the emergence of a distinct subgenre in business publishing, the Shakespeare corporate-management manual. With titles such as Shakespeare in Charge, Power Plays, and Shakespeare on Management, these volumes take as their premise the notion that Shakespeare portrays the intricacies of a universally shared human nature and direct that notion toward providing lessons in corporate motivation, leadership, personnel management, and decision-making: "Business involves people," we are told, "and people—fundamentally—don't change. The essence of business is thus remarkably constant." ¹ And so, for example, The Taming of the Shrew offers us a portrait of a successful merger between two strong-willed, independent organizations; Hamlet's Claudius becomes a case study in flawed crisis management; Portia provides an ideal model for "the art and danger of risk-taking . . . in the only Shakespearean play named after a businessman"; and Richard II, Lear, and Antony depict managers who fail because they forget that their power and authority cannot be "personalized and abstracted from the organization." ² Not surprisingly, Henry V emerges as the undisputed hero of all of these manuals, a corporate motivator who, "new on the throne and forced to prove himself, . . . uses time-tested leadership techniques to succeed most royally." ³ Paul Corrigan sets Henry's rise to power alongside that of Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, who moved from being a brutal corporate axman in the '80s to a paragon of dynamic corporate management in the '90s, all because he began to "listen to his 'subjects' and learn from the people who really knew GE's various businesses at their grass-roots," allowing him to "[harvest] good ideas from the workforce" and dramatically boost productivity. ⁴ The message is clear: like E. F. Hutton, when Shakespeare talks, people listen.

The odd image of Shakespeare that emerges from these volumes is best represented by the cover art of John Whitney and Tina Packer's Power Plays (Fig. 1), where we see Shakespeare seated in a corporate boardroom, a generic metropolitan skyline visible through the plate-glass windows behind him. The conference table is, appropriately enough, a globe, and Shakespeare is holding forth, calculator at the ready, his elbow planted in North America, a sly smile and cocked eyebrow signifying a mix of wisdom and ruthlessness, leaning in as he gives a juicy piece of inside information. His management team, Queen Elizabeth and two generic male courtiers, have looked up from their laptops and reports (one of which asks, "To be/ Or not to be?") to follow every word intently. The cover illustration of Thomas Leech's Say It Like Shakespeare is remarkably similar. Shakespeare, in this case standing, addresses a gathering of executives at a boardroom table laden with the paraphernalia of corporate power; the perspective of this image seats the viewer at the table. This Shakespeare is dressed in a business suit and tie, combined, strangely enough, with a rather large Elizabethan ruff. This bizarre hybrid may owe to the subject of Leech's book. Unlike other manuals concerned with Shakespearean insights into corporate management and strategy, Leech is concerned with Shakespeare's communication skills, which are bound up with the precise manner in which Shakespeare and his characters speak. The representation of Shakespeare as a hybrid of Renaissance and twenty-first-century styles serves, then, to minimizethe obvious gap between Shakespeare's outmoded Elizabethan idiom and modern speech. In the book itself, Leech rarely attends to the precise verbal texture of the [Begin Page 160] Shakespeare passages he so liberally quotes; to "say it like Shakespeare" doesn't mean to appropriate the language Shakespeare used but to reconceive of Shakespeare's speech as an authoritative compendium of generalized communication strategies—poetry as motivational tool. If the aesthetic dimensions...