STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England -- Hollywood loves him. Millennium lists are incomplete without him. And in the town where he was born and buried, William Shakespeare remains the indispensable man and tourist franchise.
"Next to Jesus Christ, Shakespeare is probably the best known man on the planet," says Des Rowe, who annually answers questions from thousands of visitors from America to Zimbabwe who tramp through Shakespeare's Birthplace, a timbered home that is Holy Ground for Shakespeare lovers worldwide.
Rowe has a steady patter: Feel that uneven stone floor. It was laid in 1500 -- meaning, the great man walked on it. See that heavy oak chair in the corner? The Bard himself may have sat on that chair while imbibing at a local pub. And did you Americans know that one of the world's great promoters had sinister plans for the timber-framed home you're now standing in?
"A certain American, a Mr. P.T. Barnum, wanted to buy this house, take it to America and re-erect it," Rowe says, rolling his eyes. "Imagine that."
For someone who has been dead more than 400 years, Shakespeare keeps popping up -- on the boards, the screen, the news.
The movie "Shakespeare In Love," just opened in Britain. Reviewers laud the bawdy presentation of the Bard cutting a swath through Elizabethan London. Literati are still agog that in a recent British poll of radio listeners Shakespeare topped the likes of Winston Churchill and Oliver Cromwell to be named personality of the millennium.
"I was overjoyed when I heard of that poll," says Elspeth Udvarhelyi. Now the development director at the magnificently re-created Shakespeare's Globe Theater in London, she formerly worked at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Arena Stage in Washington. "We are living in an age of diminishing vocabularies," she says. "To recognize the man who was the father of English language as we know it today, and whose work is ever-present, is encouraging."
Shakespeare can cause a sensation or a laugh. Globe Theater director Mark Rylance courted controversy the other day when he revealed that he would play Cleopatra in an all-male version of "Antony and Cleopatra."
"I am sorry that it is going to take roles from actresses," Rylance said. "It doesn't seem very politically correct." Asked who would play Antony in the sexually-charged play, Rylance joked, "I am choosy."
The fact that Shakespeare can inspire -- and even offend -- in this age is grist for an entire literary industry.
