Culture essay: Shakespeare and the Question of Work

Lana Woolf

There is perhaps no name more encrusted with reverence than that of William Shakespeare. The word itself is a kind of cathedral now—evoked in solemn tones, half-whispered in the presence of genius. We study him in schools, quote him in speeches, carve him in marble. He is the writer par excellence, the Englishman beyond England, the answer we give when asked what our culture once was and still, perhaps, aspires to be.

But what if we look at Shakespeare not as a monument, but as a man at work?

He was, after all, a working playwright. A jobbing actor. A part-owner in a theatre company. A man concerned not only with verse and vision, but with audiences, earnings, and entrances. His theatre, The Globe, was also his office. His collected works are not just a canon—they are a career.

He didn’t know he was writing “Shakespeare.” He was writing for money. For applause. For posterity, yes, but also for Tuesday night.

And therein lies the real miracle.

Shakespeare wrote as one who knew the urgency of employment. Born the son of a glover in Stratford-upon-Avon, his education was good but incomplete. He was not university-educated, unlike Marlowe or Jonson. He appears in no great academic tradition. Instead, he travelled to London and found work—humble, precarious, unpredictable work. He acted in other men’s plays. He edited, revised, marketed, borrowed, recycled. He had a family to feed. A business to maintain. The theatre was often closed by plague. His reputation was never fixed, always in negotiation.

And yet, through that churn of deadlines and disarray, he composed a body of work that still illuminates the deepest questions of our lives: love, power, jealousy, ambition, failure, forgiveness. Not because he stood apart from the working world—but because he stood inside it.

Shakespeare understood employment. He understood kings and their responsibilities, but also clowns and their roles. He wrote not only Hamlet and Lear, but the Gravedigger and the Fool. He gave voice to the servant as well as the sovereign. His world teemed with professions: soldiers, merchants, messengers, courtiers, shepherds, midwives, witches, thieves, priests. Every play is a labour market in miniature. Every scene a lesson in the economy of the soul.

Take King Lear, where the abdication of work—Lear’s refusal to do the job of reigning—leads to catastrophe. Or Macbeth, where ambition becomes employment corrupted, a job description turned into blood. Or The Tempest, where Prospero sets down his magic—his work, his art—in favour of a return to ordinary governance.

Or take Henry V, where a young king finds that the performance of leadership is itself a form of labour. “Upon the king! Let us our lives, our souls, / Our debts, our careful wives, / Our children, and our sins lay on the king!” cries the soldier Williams. In other words: to be employed as a ruler is to be employed in everyone’s anxieties. It is a crushing contract.

Even the comedies are riddled with labour. As You Like It takes place largely among shepherds. Twelfth Night among stewards and waiting-women. Shakespeare saw that love does not unfold in palaces, but in the break rooms and backstage areas of life. His lovers must work to be together. Mistaken identities aside, their greatest challenge is often economic.

And what of the theatre itself? In Shakespeare’s time, it was not the elite institution we know today. It was noisy, smelly, democratic. Groundlings jeered from the pit. Actors changed costumes in plain sight. The line between art and hustle was porous.

Shakespeare thrived there not because he transcended it—but because he mastered it. He was adaptable. He rewrote when needed. He gave his audience what they wanted, and then—crucially—what they didn’t yet know they needed.

Here is the key to his employability. Not just his talent, but his versatility. He moved between genres, between patrons, between moods. History one year, tragedy the next, then a comedy, a problem play, a sonnet sequence. He didn’t resist the conditions of his time—he danced with them.

This is why he remains so modern. In an age like ours, where careers twist and shift, where reinvention is constant, Shakespeare is a patron saint of creative employability. He teaches us that craft is not a fixed thing. That greatness can be improvised. That excellence is not always announced from above, but assembled from below—line by line, play by play, deal by deal.

And perhaps this is why he continues to matter in the world of work. His words enter our emails, our courtrooms, our pitches, our vows. He’s the bard of the breakroom as much as the palace. He has something to say about power and its uses. About colleagues and betrayal. About purpose and burnout. About the long day’s journey into night.

In the end, Shakespeare shows us not how to escape labour, but how to dignify it. He dignifies the speaker, the listener, the maker, the dreamer. And in doing so, he offers us a vision of work not as drudgery, but as poetry—a place where our talents meet the world’s needs, again and again, until we, too, can say: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”

And then, quietly, return to the task at hand.