Four hundred years on, the numbers say he’s still the biggest name in the business.
(Written for my matrics of 2026) Not sure they ever read it. I hope you will. It is about a very important play. One of Planet Earth’s biggest assets, and written by an enlightened man who changed this same world by being.
Here is a strange fact to start with: the writer your syllabus keeps forcing on you is, by most estimates, the best-selling author in human history. Around four billion copies of Shakespeare’s works have been sold — a number that puts him ahead of every thriller writer, every fantasy series, every celebrity memoir ever printed.
Not bad for a man who has been dead for over four hundred years and never once went on a book tour. And he isn’t sitting quietly on a shelf, either. Shakespeare holds the Guinness World Record as the most-filmed author of all time, with more than four hundred film and television adaptations of his plays — and Hamlet alone has been filmed over fifty times.
His work has been translated into more than a hundred languages, including, believe it or not, Klingon. Somewhere on Earth right now, it is a fairly safe bet that someone is performing one of his plays. Four centuries of continuous performance, and the run shows no sign of
closing. You have also been quoting him your whole life without knowing it. If you have ever broken the ice, gone on a wild goose chase, waited with bated breath, been in a pickle, met someone with a heart of gold or watched something vanish into thin air — that’s all him.
Scholars estimate his plays contain the first recorded use of roughly 1,700 English words. He didn’t just write in the language you speak; he helped build it. Hollywood certainly hasn’t stopped borrowing.
The Lion King is Hamlet with lions — murdered king, guilty uncle, a prince who runs from his duty. West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet. 10 Things I Hate About You is The Taming of the Shrew wearing a high-school uniform. When modern writers need a story that works, they keep reaching for the same four-hundred-year-old blueprints, because nobody has drawn better ones.
There is a South African chapter to this story too. On Robben Island, a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works was secretly passed among the political prisoners, disguised behind Diwali greeting cards. Dozens of them signed their names beside the lines that meant the most to them.
Nelson Mandela chose a passage from Julius Caesar: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” Men facing life sentences found their own courage written down by a playwright from another century, on another continent.
That book is now called the Robben Island Bible. And that, in the end, is the real answer. We don’t study Shakespeare because he is old; plenty
of old writing is forgotten. We study him because he understood people — jealousy, ambition, grief, first love, the fear of making the wrong choice — better than almost anyone before or since, and people haven’t changed.
In 2020, a single copy of his First Folio sold for nearly ten million dollars. But the ideas inside it? Those are sitting in your setwork, free. Four billion readers already took the deal.
It might be worth finding out why.
You can download a 20-page booklet about Hamlet for FREE from my website: https://pages.lourensbreytenbach.com/english
Good night Sweet Princes and Princesses!
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