Circum-Global Transmission of Value: Leveraging Henry V’s Cultural Inheritance

Abstract

Questions of value underlie much of the critical debate about Shakespeare’s plays and their repurposing in a global knowledge economy. Value has a “direct effect on people’s actual behaviour” (Graeber 3). This case study of Henry V questions how a “democratic” exchange process enables a “collective intelligence” (Moulie Boutang 34) to generate value. The field of business leadership development works to leverage the play’s inherited value to augment personal exchange value. Yet the pragmatic choice to exploit the Shakespeare brand, to utilize its “immaterial capital” (50), also reperforms previously constructed values. Selectively transmitting Shakespeare’s work into hybrid cultural-business products has ethical ramifications. The appropriation perpetuates business habits that privilege end-goals and individual gain, and reinforces a learned disincentive to practice egalitarian or “democratic” access to resources.