William Shakespeare of Another Timeline?

When I teach kids English in my current home in Hohhot, China, I try to include information about different English-speaking cultures into the lessons. I’ll use videos and PowerPoints to not only improve their English, but also show them a bit of culture outside of China. For example, one of our more recent lessons was on different types of music, so the kids had to learn words such as jazz and country. Of course many if not all of my Chinese students didn’t have any clue what jazz or country music sounded like, so I had them watched music videos of Dizzy Gillespie and Garth Brooks, and then had them discuss what they saw in their steadily improving English.

More recently I decided to try a little something different. I made a PowerPoint presentation, and told them whom William Shakespeare was. Then I showed them a clip of Kenneth Bragnah portraying Henry V. Granted I didn’t expect these kids, most of whom are no more than ten, to grasp anywhere close to what he was saying. But I wanted my students to at least hear what old English sounded like.

While I was preparing for this lesson, I got to thinking. If the English language weren’t as prevalent in the world, would William Shakespeare be nearly as well known or popular as he is?

First off, it’s kind of a miracle that William Shakespeare’s work has survived at all. While his plays were performed to great acclaim, they were seldom published, and Shakespeare himself was probably relatively modest about them. It’s doubtful that he thought they would be of interest to anyone centuries beyond his death. It’s thanks to two friends of his, John Heminges and Henry Condell, that the plays got properly published after Shakespeare’s death. Otherwise most of not all of them would have been lost to history, a fate that probably befell a lot of plays of English writers of that time period.

But in addition to the work of two of Shakespeare’s close friends, I think the growth of the English language contributed to his legacy. About half a millennium ago, the number of English speakers was estimated to be less than ten million and mostly of people living within Britain. Since then the amount of English speakers, and the influence of the language, have grown drastically. It’s now one of the most widely spoken languages on the face of the Earth, with well more than a billion speakers of it (not to mention more that want to learn to speak it). There’s no way that William Shakespeare, or even Queen Elizabeth, could have imagined that so many people would have spoken their native language in the future.

It’s honestly why I, a native speaker of English, am able to obtain a job in China teaching my language to little children with barely any knowledge of Chinese myself.

There are many factors to why the English language has grown so much. A large part of this was the British Empire. During Shakespeare’s day the British were beginning to colonize the Americas, but it wouldn’t be until later on that other territories such as India would be under their control. During the heights of the British Empire, about a quarter of the world’s territories were within its grasps. Also there’s the rise of my own country, the United States, with it gaining both economic and political influence on the world stage.

But let’s imagine if history had happened a little differently. Let’s just say that instead of Great Britain taking over India that it was the other way around. Imagine if India created a vast Empire that include the British Isles, along with maybe other parts of Europe and the world at large. Instead of English being the dominant language, perhaps Hindi or one of the many other languages of India would have been it. If that had happened, then maybe there wouldn’t have been much interest in Shakespeare, not even from Englishmen. Perhaps instead, a writer who wrote in Hindi would have become more famous throughout the world. Someone who in real life is barely a footnote in the history of literature might have become the Shakespeare of an alternate timeline.

The same thing could have happened if some other country had become much more prominent in power and in the affairs of the world. If another language such as Swahili, Korean, Cherokee, or anything else had become the world’s lingua franca, then perhaps another writer would have been better renowned throughout the many civilizations of humanity.

Now, I’m not saying that William Shakespeare wasn’t a great writer. He definitely was. But his writing being remembered and being the influence upon the world’s literature isn’t strictly because of how talented he was. A lot of it was due to things that were way beyond the control of Shakespeare, forces that not even he could have imagined with his great imagination. 

Note: If you want, you can check out my fantasy novel "The Princess of Infinite Tomorrows," online and currently for free at https://princessofinfinitetomorrows.blogspot.com/.