Sympathise with the Losers: Performing Intellectual Loserdom in Shakespearean Biopic

Anne Hathaway chides her playwright husband in the television sitcom Upstart Crow (2016-) with the typically blunt comment, ‘Will, I told ya. Don’t do comedy. It’s not your strong point.’ Shakespeare, played by David Mitchell, responds in indignation, ‘It is my strong point, wife. It just requires lengthy explanations and copious footnotes. If you do your research my stuff is actually really funny.’ Mitchell’s Shakespeare exists within what Christy Desmet describes as a ‘system or network of tiny units’, governed by ‘changing relations that are, at bottom, accidental’ (2017, 11). Indeed, Shakespeare’s claim may sound familiar to anyone who has endeavoured to teach Shakespeare to resistant students, but it echoes depictions of the playwright on screen such as Shakespeare in Love, Bill, Will or even Doctor Who. Shakespeare’s fussiness in Upstart Crow is Mitchell’s, too. It intersects with not only similarly fastidious roles in series such as Peep Show (2003-2015) but Mitchell’s deployment of a curmudgeonly celebrity persona on panel shows like Would I Like To You? (2007-) or QI (2003-).

This chapter proposes to look at the Shakespeare object in television comedies in order to discuss the dissonance of presenting failure as a pre-requisite to Shakespeare’s inevitable cultural capital. It will do this chiefly by reading Mitchell-Shakespeare in Upstart Crow as the negotiation of two semiotically-rich objects within an erratic network of meaning and through association with values either typically synonymous with Shakespearean celebrity (success, skill, sophistication, virtuosity) or their opposite (failure, awkwardness, embarrassment).