The best things in life

The value of the real thing

My downstairs toilet is decorated with framed posters for some of the plays I appeared in when I was doing amateur dramatics—more for the amusement of visitors than my own. One of them, for the first play I ever did in Brussels, which has proved to have a surreal importance for me in the ensuing years, bears at its foot the following text: “English Comedy Club - Performance by amateurs under licence from Samuel French”. Each performance of that play cost the troupe of actors known as the English Comedy Club a licence fee. If the director had made that plain to us actors from the outset, perhaps we would have learned our lines more thoroughly and more quickly, who knows? Most of the other posters in that water closet bear no such legend: they are for plays by William Shakespeare and no licence is needed to put on a play by him.

I’ll not venture an opinion on which is the better playwright: Tim Firth or William Shakespeare. One doesn’t really need to have a view on that in order to put on a play by either of them. Usually, it is the play which one chooses, and the playwright’s name is then irrelevant. Or is it? The vocation of the Brussels Shakespeare Society is to put on plays by—wait for it—Shakespeare (and, it says in their constitution, the classics, which is, shall we say, a broad church in the end of the day). But the choice open to the English Comedy Club is wide open. As long as it’s not American (which is the domain of the American Theatre Company), Irish (the Irish Theatre Group), European (the European Theatre Club, a sort of add-on in Brussels, so they call themselves ETC.—yes, the Europeans at the heart of Europe are the et cetera group), or a musical (which is, ta-dah!—an area covered by the Brussels Light Opera Company).

Do you know who wrote Pygmalion? Le Dieu du Carnage? Copenhagen? The Importance of Being Earnest? 12 Angry Men? Love’s Labours Lost? Waiting for Godot? L’avare? Some you will, perhaps, some you maybe won’t. Some of their authors are dead, and some are living (Le Dieu du Carnage and Copenhagen). They are all the product of work, by their authors. Some of them achieved fame, and fortune and a comfortable living from their work during their lifetime, and some of these works are still providing an income even though the authors are dead. The work of these writers provides income for individuals, during their lifetimes, who had nothing to do with writing the play itself. They are beneficiaries under the law of copyright. The right to copy. The right to erect an impenetrable fence around intellectual works and act as the gatekeeper for who can and cannot enter. The income arises simply from standing at the doorway and demanding money, for something that someone else wrote (photographed, filmed, et cetera).

William Shakespeare made his money by performing the plays that he wrote. When he died, in 1616, he stopped performing. Really, he did. We know he stopped performing in 1616 because he stopped earning in 1616. He did not earn one penny after he had been committed to his grave. And no one, not even William himself, has dared to disturb his grave since that fateful day in April 1616. And we know this because of what it says on his gravestone in Stratford:

Image: to read the text, you need to add a syllable to enclosèd, but not to either of blest or curs’d, and no implied ’s on Jesus’. Ye (þͤ) is the ancient spelling of The, not You, using a letter that has been lost to the English language—the digraph thorn. You think Shakespeare’s easy, eh?

It’s clear that William Shakespeare was keen that no one should profit from him once he’d been laid to rest. Not so Samuel Beckett, whose works are jealously guarded by his estate right down to the finest production details: you can find productions of The Tempest or Julius Caesar by Shakespeare in which the entire cast is female, but not of Beckett’s plays. Some Dutch lesbians tried it with Waiting for Godot once, and were viciously sued, and lost. They were not sued by Beckett, who died in 1989, but by his executors, whose names appear nowhere in the play’s published text.

There are a number of definitions of work. In physics, work is the energy transferred to or from an object via the application of force along a displacement. In its simplest form, for a constant force aligned with the direction of motion, the work equals the product of the force strength and the distance travelled.

In the field of employment, however, work is as good as undefinable. This afternoon, I will be going to a meeting with a potential client that is interested in engaging my services to write some texts for them. And I know that at some point, I will be asked how much I propose to charge them for these services. And I do not know the answer to that question. It is thinking about the answer to that question that has prompted me to write this article today.

If I were to ask them for the basic minimum wage, which is around 15 euros an hour, would that be fair? You will ask me in return whether I consider my services to be worth 15 euros an hour. Or more. A working day is eight hours, so, 15 euros an hour brings me a wage of 120 euros. From that, tax and social security need to be deducted. Let’s say for argument’s sake that I’m left with 80 euros, so my question is primarily: can I live today on 80 euros?

No, you will rail at me: that’s not the question. The question is how much your services are worth to the client. Well, I’m not the client. I’d need to ask the client that question and now comes the 64,000 dollar question: would they tell me? And, if they did, would they tell me the truth?

I could play a sort of poker, or auction, with them: We’ll raise your 15 to 20. I’ll raise it to 25. One thing is sure: at some point they will say the following words, or something akin to them: we can’t, of course, pay you what you were earning before, whereby the definitions of the words can’t and of course are left in nebulous suspension. Brave is he who would venture the questions Can’t, or won’t? and Why not? Much better is to remain in stony silence, and see who blinks first.

How much do you suppose Coca-Cola paid for its slogan It’s the real thing? Four words. “C’est la vraie chose”, “Es ist das echte Ding”, “Het is het echte voorwerp”, in French, German and Dutch, respectively. No charge. My fee for these translations would normally be about 40 cents, but today you have them for nothing. Keep them safe. I honestly have no idea how much the original English cost, but I could find out what it’s worth to the Coca-Cola company, by copying it. The sum they’d then sue me for is likely to be exaggerated, but we’d have some idea of the ballpark we’re in. It would be a pretty big ballpark. Whatever they paid for it, only they can use it. For ever, pretty much.

Copyright is not for ever, it’s for a very long period after a writer dies. I’m not entirely sure what the difference is between conferring copyright for a year after someone dies and conferring it for 75 years, because time, as such, ceases to exist for the dead. But, the laws do vary. No one may enjoy Beckett for free until Beckett has lain in his grave for about 75 years. What about the coal that is dug out of the earth by miners?

Well, coal is burned and once it’s burned it forms particles, which, we now know, hang around for 75 years and more. But you don’t need to pay to breathe them in, like you had to pay for the coal.

But nary a miner dug coal from the earth with his muscles and sweat to then say: I will hold you to ransom and deny you the fruit of my labour for long after I am gone from this life. One of the nefarious effects of capitalism is to corner a resource for oneself and to exploit it to the inordinate cost of others. But the flip side of that is almost as bad: to jealously deny the rest of mankind the pleasure of something created for pleasure’s sake for decades after one has gone to one’s own maker, a transfiguration that costs no charge at all, other than that borne by our souls.

Our definition of work in terms of employment, the constructs by which we extend it to work done after death (the rentier economy), and the way we dismiss the efforts of miners compared to the efforts of merchant bankers in terms of what we view as an acceptable wage, all make no sense whatsoever when we look at the definition of work in terms of the laws of physics. Force times distance. The destination matters not.

We pay for most things. And we often pay what is demanded, despite what the item may actually be worth to us. The price is set not by an evaluation of worth, but by a fabricated sense of desire and, when we have little choice, our ability, if not entirely our willingness, to pay the price demanded. William Shakespeare is maybe the single most famous playwright ever. And you can revel in the beauty of his words for nothing. For ever. The best things in life truly are free, even if we sometimes have to sell them for our living.