Shakespeare Performances in England, 2000

Summary

In 1966 John Lennon caused an uproar by suggesting that Jesus Christ was less popular than the Beatles: in the year of the said Messiah’s official two thousandth birthday it appeared as though the profile of the man from Nazareth had been eclipsed instead by that of a man from Stratford, but no one, in Britain at least, seemed to be at all shocked. Shakespeare, chosen as Man of the Millennium by listeners to BBC Radio 4, featured at least as prominently in public celebrations of the year 2000 as did Christ: supposedly the last safe symbol of common culture for a nation increasingly committed to religious diversity, his complete plays were even acted in abbreviated versions by schoolchildren in a number of British cities (notably at the Millennium Dome in London, an edifice whose souvenir book, The Official Commemorative Album for the Millennium, devotes nearly as much space to Shakespeare as it does to religion). Shakespeare plays were selected as millennial offerings, too, by an unusually large range of theatre companies, amateur and professional.