Books & Poetry

Wealthy people wouldn’t own Lear jets. The rest of us would have no Ariel liquid, or Hamlet cigars.

The Royal Marlowe Company would have a pretty limited repertoire (‘Ah, it’s the history plays this year. “Edward II” , er… “The Massacre at Paris”… what do you mean you can’t find all of it?’).

London would have no speed bumps – mainly because Shakespeare invented the word ‘bump’.

Withnail would lose his final speech outside the wolf enclosure at London Zoo, and British cinema would lose one of its most beautiful endings.

‘Desert Island Disc’ guests would be handed the Bible and the complete works of… Chaucer? Milton? Wordsworth?

Milton would be the national poet and genius. As a result, Britain would be a thoroughly Protestant nation, and more rebellious to boot. We might even have finished off the Civil War properly. Divorce rates would be through the roof.

We wouldn’t feel the need to visit Stratford-upon-Avon, instead recognising it as the dull, ugly, middle England town it is (with fewer tearooms and hanging baskets). Feature continues

London’s climate would be less erratic, because of less global warming. Typing the Bard’s name into amazon.co.uk brings up 19,499 items in the books section alone, and in terms of the Shakespeare industry, that’s just the tip of the iceberg (which is, of course, melting thanks to all the trees that have been cut down to print so many books).

A degree in English literature would take about four months to complete.

Leytonstone’s David Beckham would have named his second child Casanova.

Aldous Huxley would have had to think of a new title for his dystopian novel ‘Brave New World’, which he nicked from ‘The Tempest’.

We count 12 London drinking dens that would have to change their name, including the Shakespeare Ale House in Heathrow’s terminal two, and Shakespeare’s Pizzeria (it also serves beer) in Clerkenwell. If you want to check our Bard booze count, feel free.

We’d have none of the umpteen spin-off creations: no ‘Romeo and Juliet’, no ‘West Side Story’. No ‘The Tempest’, no ‘Forbidden Planet’; no ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, no ‘Carry on Cleo’; no ‘Hamlet’, no ‘The Lion King’; no ‘Othello’, no board game.

Agatha Christie would have had to come up with a different name for ‘The Mousetrap’ (as well as many of her other thrillers).

Other phrases we’d have to do without: ‘bated breath’ (‘The Merchant of Venice’); ‘blinking idiot’ (‘The Merchant of Venice’); ‘cruel to be kind’ (‘Hamlet’); ‘a dish fit for the Gods’ (‘Julius Caesar’); ‘eaten out of house and home’ (‘Henry IV Part 2’); ‘foregone conclusion’ (‘Othello’); ‘laid on with a trowel’ (‘As You Like It’); ‘neither rhyme nor reason’ (‘The Comedy of Errors’); ‘short shrift’ (‘Richard III’); ‘sterner stuff’ (‘Julius Caesar’); ‘too much of a good thing’ (‘As You Like It’); ‘tower of strength’ (‘Richard III’); or ‘wild goose chase’ (‘Romeo and Juliet’).

Love lives in the city would be also significantly simpler, since we wouldn’t ‘wrestle with our affections’, ‘wear our hearts upon our sleeves’, be ‘green-eyed with jealousy’ or, indeed, make the ‘beast with two backs’.

Bear-baiting wouldn’t have got the press that it did.

The 1944 film of ‘Henry V’ starring Laurence Olivier was considered a patriotic call to arms at a vital stage of the war. So, presumably, without it we would have lost.

The 29 streets in Greater London named after the Bard would need new patrons (what’s wrong with Tessa Sanderson Place?). Shakspeare Mews and Shakspeare Walk, both in N16, would possibly escape thanks to what appear to be typos.

Outdoor shops such as Millets would not be able to advertise winter sales with the line: ‘This is the winter of our discount tents.’

The TV series ‘To the Manor Born’ and ‘The Darling Buds of May’ would have to be called something else. Like ‘Heartbeat’, maybe. Hitchcock’s classic ‘North by Northwest’ would have had to have been called ‘The Man Who Sneezed in Lincoln’s Nose’, as he had threatened.

With no Scottish play, the actors who hang around Shuttleworths on Charing Cross Road would have to find another play to hang their silly superstitions on.

An infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite length of time would have to come up with someone else’s complete works.

Virginia Woolf argued in an essay that if Shakespeare had a sister who was a better writer than him, she wouldn’t have got a look-in because she was a woman. This led to the Smiths song ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’, and the post-Bananarama group of the same name. So without the Bard, we wouldn’t have had the number one hit ‘Stay’.

The play wouldn’t be the thing.

Christopher Marlowe would no longer be the Gordon Brown to Tony Blair’s William Shakespeare.

And finally, Time Out as you know it wouldn’t have existed – for ’twas the Bard who invented the word ‘critic’.