3 Lessons in Business From the Life of William Shakespeare

We’re all aware of William Shakespeare’s stature as one of England’s greatest poets and dramatists. Less well known, perhaps, is that Shakespeare had a real knack for business. Indeed, Shakespeare managed to do what few people would have thought possible at the time: he and his business partners turned writing and performing plays into a profitable, respectable enterprise in an age when stage drama was considered low-brow entertainment at best.

Here are three common lessons reinforced by the example of Shakespeare’s life and success as an entrepreneur:

1. Go where the action is

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

     —Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3

London was the center of culture and innovation in Shakespeare’s England, and so the young bard left his wife and three children behind in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon and ventured to London to better support his family and make his way. That probably wasn’t easy, but (in context) it was a well-calculated and necessary risk. Shakespeare knew that it isn’t enough to be the right person for the job. You have to be the right person in the right place and time. In Shakespeare’s England, no one could have become a relevant, successful playwright outside of London’s theatrical world.

In our time, of course, there is rarely a single place where the “action” is (even innovation in the tech field has long since bled past the borders of Silicon Valley), but there remain hubs of influence and specific cities more favorable to professionals and young entrepreneurs seeking to start a business in different fields. Research which regions and cities are likeliest to attract the top talent and most reliable funding opportunities in your field of interest, and put yourself and your new business at the center of that storm (just don’t abandon your spouse and children along the way!).

2. Aim to please

Gentle breath of yours my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails,

Which was to please.

—  The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1

Shakespeare was no brooding romantic disinterested in monetary gain. He was a commercially-driven artist who wrote to make money for himself and the other actor-shareholders in the acting company (the King’s Men) to which he belonged. And that meant largely giving his audiences what they wanted.

For instance, Shakespeare started his writing career by jumping on a popular bandwagon and writing plays about famous English kings (Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II, etc.), but when his audience’s tastes moved away from history plays toward tragedies (e.g., Hamlet) and dark comedies (e.g., Measure for Measure) in the early 1600s, the nature of his output changed as well. Curiously, Shakespeare’s career tracks theatrical trends so well during his active years that it isn’t easy to know if he was following those trends or creating them, but, in any case, Shakespeare’s work changed with his audience—always giving them what they wanted when they wanted it.

Strangely, many budding entrepreneurs fail to perceive this basic truth about a successful business. If you start a company merely to satisfy your own niche cravings, you’ll quickly find yourself going under. Why? Because a business is really a form of exchange between you and the people who place value in what your business produces or the service it provides. Without working hard to create a clear customer base (and without fixating obsessively on what those customers want and evolving with them), that exchange either will not take place at all or it will not last.

3. It’s not all about you

This can be a tough one for some entrepreneurs. By nature, it seems, entrepreneurs are overloaded (overburdened?) with a million ideas and not enough time, or even enough life, to pursue them all. Under such circumstances, why shouldn’t entrepreneurs’ businesses exist solely to explore and actualize their unique visions?

Yet, if your business becomes successful and you end up hiring likeminded, equally talented individuals (and they are out there!), it will be impossible to view your company as merely a vehicle for the exploration of your ideas. Rather, you’ll need to imagine your company—whether you formed it alone or not—as an entity distinct from yourself—as something you have a part in but which nevertheless has its own trajectory and needs. Those needs might require the exclusion of many of your own personal projects for the sake of focusing the company’s income, assets, and manpower on pursuing its collective ends.

Here, Shakespeare again provides an excellent model. Shakespeare wrote about two or three plays per year, on average, but the King’s Men regularly purchased and performed plays by other playwrights, including his friend and (and occasional enemy) Ben Jonson. As he grew older, moreover, Shakespeare also welcomed collaborations with John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton, both talented young playwrights who might have otherwise become his professional rivals, in the process educating his own replacement when John Fletcher became the King’s Men’s main playwright when Shakespeare finally retired.

Shakespeare appears to have understood, in other words, that the King’s Men weren’t merely a vehicle for his expression. Rather, his plays were vehicles by which the King’s Men could achieve their collective vision. The business itself was what mattered most.