The London 2012 cultural festival will celebrate one Briton who cannot be beaten in his field
Traditionally, a cultural festival is held alongside the Olympic Games, to celebrate achievements of the mind as well as the body, although such events rarely enjoy a high profile. Poets might compete with each other, but not in a way that, if staged in public, would outsell the men's 100 metres.
Still, an important part of London's bid to stage next year's Olympics was a promise to breathe life into the artistic side of things. Last week, some details emerged of the programme. Predictably, Shakespeare dominates the field. The Royal Shakespeare Company and the Globe theatre in London will both put on seasons of the Bard's works. The BBC will broadcast a series of his plays with star-studded casts. The British Museum will host a Shakespeare exhibition.
Some scholars are concerned that other great British writers are being neglected. Jane Austen is a globally revered author too. And what about Dickens? The Bront�s? Chaucer? Such grumbling is inevitable, but then scholars are no more immune than anyone else to indulging in the "factious bandying of their favourites? when envy breeds unkind division" (as a well-known Elizabethan playwright once wrote).
Of course, not everyone is persuaded of Shakespeare's greatness. In 1765, Voltaire declared that Hamlet came from the imagination of a "drunken savage". Shakespeare's plays, he observed, had no appeal in France, adding that "it is not a good sign of a nation's taste that the things it admires cannot succeed abroad". If, perchance, Paris should win a contest to host the Olympics, Voltaire's views will find a wider audience.
Meanwhile, in 2012, it is Shakespeare who will straddle the world stage as Britain's untouchable champion, and deservedly so. He is not just integral to our culture, he is part of the language, woven invisibly into the idiom of daily life. To any who doubt it, consider Rosalind's question to Orlando in Act IV of As You Like It: "Can one desire too much of a good thing?"
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/29/shakespeare-one-untouchable-olympic-champion
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