Maybe it’s because although Shakespeare as a writer is of course inimitable, the hundreds (if not thousands) of tribute acts in novel, movie, stage, short story and any number of other formats have been enriching the literary life of the English-speaking world for centuries, and of the non-English-speaking world, too.

The classic Japanese movie for example, is an epic retelling of Shakespeare’s set in the world of the Samurai. The American novelist Jane Smiley won a Pulitzer Prize for for her own take on the story of a notvery-imaginative, overbearing father and his three