We Asked Europeans How Much They Care About Shakespeare

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Shakespeare has officially crossed over, and it only took a few centuries. Four hundred years after his death, a YouGov survey commissioned by the British Council found that, to about 18,000 people polled in a selection of 15 countries around the world, Bill is more more popular outside of the UK than in it. 65 percent of people said they "liked" him, versus 59 percent of UK respondents.

As hilariously small as that margin may be, liking Shakespeare never felt that important anyway. In school, "getting" him could be exhilarating, performing his work potentially transformative, and memorizing his sonnets the sort of deeply self-indulgent thing someone might do to impress a teacher or crush. But liking him? We thought he'd only been figuratively rammed down the throats of kids in English-speaking countries, so we asked some of our fellow VICE editors in Europe how relevant he's been in their lives.

Theater's a pretty big thing here because it was one of the few forms of artistic expression encouraged during the communist regime. Most major cities in the country have a "Shakespeare festival," where they play Romanian versions of the bard's works—though they can have a weird nationalist twist. I'd take part in the Bucharest one, in English, and I loved doing it. The high point of my "career" was playing Hamlet after the lead actor got sick; I can still recite large portions of his monologue when I'm drunk. – Mihai Popescu

I've known about Shakespeare since I was a little girl. My father was a writer/translator, so he translated a lot of his works into Serbian and was very well know for being able to transfer the puns and ambiguity into our language. By the time I was 7, I knew Puck's last monologue by heart—in Serbian of course. Anyway, he is very respected and well-known in Serbia and the ABC of literature, especially in drama schools. He is still being translated by new, young translators and the plays are often published as part of the Complete Works. – Katarina Petrovic

I grew up watching British MTV and went to a literature-oriented class, so I might have been a bit overexposed to your culture, but both Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth are part of the ordinary curriculum. We all get a fair share of Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet was actually my first experience with him—not the book though, it was that Leo DiCaprio film. All my friends thought that those guns with words dagger and longsword engraved on them were oh-so-cool. And as school went on, I bought copies of Hamlet, A Midsummer's Night Dream, and The Tempest from the discount shelf at the secondhand bookshop, because I thought being grounded in fine literature could help me in pick up girls. I don't think it ever did. – Maciek PiaseckI

Here, like everywhere else in the western world I guess, we have to read his plays and poems during English class. For the rest of our lives when someone randomly mentions his name we nod and mumble "the Bard," "a pound of flesh," or "Friends, Romans, countrymen." His plays are far lighter to digest than any Italian playwright's and you can actually watch them. On the other hand, we somehow take pride in Shakespeare's work as, you know, Venice, Verona, the ancient Romans, etc. Sorry guys. But some of our "countrymen" have crossed the line and decided to reclaim Shakespeare as Italian, on vague linguistic bases. That's why we have a thing about Shakespeare: he was a Sicilian guy with a gold loop earring who named Shylocks and Romeos and didn't quite study history. – Elena Viale

I was seven when I first came across a Shakespeare quote, though I have to admit it was through Baz Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet. Back then, I was clearly too young to understand the oxymorons Leonardo DiCaprio was reciting, and couldn't grasp why my then-15 year-old sister was screaming hysterically every time Leo opened his mouth. Loads of young French people discovered Shakespeare through this movie—only to study his works later on, be it in French or English class. I studied in the city of Angers, but he's a legend all over France and has been translated by some of the greatest French contemporary authors, from André Gide to Voltaire. We adore Shakespeare—but not everybody knows how to pronounce his name correctly. – Julie Le Baron

Growing up near Amsterdam, Shakespeare wasn't really a thing until I went to high school, when we started learning English and muddling through Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet. When I was around 15, our teacher took us on a class outing to see a modern version of Romeo and Juliet, where they played "Rock DJ" and "Let's Get Loud" in between the scenes. Most of the class got drunk before the show and kept on yelling and booing throughout. We were eventually asked to leave. So yeah, while almost everyone in the Netherlands is aware that he's one of your literary greats, the general attitude towards actually sitting through one of his plays is pretty much the same as that of my former classmates: booze helps. – Lisette Van Eijk

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," says Marcellus, shouting out my home country in Hamlet. The play's setting in Helsingør is the sole reason most people care about Shakespeare in Denmark—we love it when the outside world notices us. We feel this in spite of the play describing our nation as one would a smelly fridge, where you can't quite figure out which dairy product has gone bad. To further milk this somewhat pathetic claim to fame, "Hamlet's Castle" doubles as the venue for the Shakespare Festival every year, where thespians can gather to bask in ole William's genius. Either way, thanks for putting us on the map, Bill. – Lene Munk

Growing up, Shakespeare was always the poster child for sophisticated England. I don't remember us reading Shakespeare in school but I definitely remember my theatre classes always shoving monologues from Hamlet or Macbeth down our throats. My most vivid Shakespeare-related memory comes from Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet in 1996, where Leonardo DiCaprio's exquisite face can be seen through a fish tank. – Camila-Catalina Fernandez

I grew up in Zaragoza in the 80s and the truth is that Shakespeare wasn't a big hit there. The first thing I remember about him is a comedian in a funny TV show saying: "Ser o no ser, esa es la cuestión" (To be or not to be, that is the question), with a skull in his hand what appeared tp be in an absurd situation. So I suppose Shakespeare at that time was most easily transferred through a silly Hamlet cliché. – Juanjo Villalba

I'm not sure my experience really counts because I first learned about Shakespeare when I went abroad to a school in England for a year when I was 11. The English teacher there read Macbeth with us, and I remember liking it a lot because he was Scottish and his accent fit the play very well. The worst was when I went to school in France for a year, and the English teacher there also wanted to read Macbeth. Having French teenagers read Shakespeare is obviously the worst. I still like Macbeth, though, and I think in general German people have a lot of respect for Shakespeare, so don't worry. – Matern Boesalager