Shakespeare, had he lived, would’ve turned 450 on April 23rd. Or the 22nd,or the 25th: no-one is quite sure. Still, it’s a solid number, and round. It will excuse any number of articles. (Yes, I know.) In Paris La Société Française Shakespeare is organising a week-long conference; the dozens of events planned in Stratford are helpfully outlined at shakespearesbirthday.org.uk. Things are happening pretty much as you might expect.

What Shakespeare’s ubiquity obscures, and not just presently, is how weird a position he occupies in culture today. In theatre and in film there is a tacit Shakespearean ladder, Hamlet-crowned. An actor must be exceptionally successful to play lead roles in any professional film or play, but to play one of the great Shakespearean roles is to vie for immortality, to append your name to a roll-call of the best performers known. And familiarity with his plays is a sort of cultural obligation, the groundwater of cultural capital.

Cambridge, as ever, acts as a kind of selective microcosm for the world. A season without a hard-hitting Shakespearean mainshow is almost unimaginable. Yet such productions operate via a series of unspoken paradoxes. We rarely mention the difficulty of comprehending Elizabethan language, but how many of us have let our attention slide and missed whole blocks of verse? The demands of merely parsing meaning are held in balance by extensive foreknowledge of the texts.

And then there are the productions themselves: how many shows have we seen constructed around a not altogether productive transposition of the play? It’s a curious consequence of the playwright’s unassailable pre-eminence that concept-treatments, however gimmicky, are rewarded. (An Onion headline recognised this well: ‘Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended’.) Is it possible that we are fitting century-old texts to present-day concerns instead of, or at the expense of, contemporary writing? Is this really the most productive application of such texts? Or are the texts themselves lost amid such effusions of cultural production?

A. D. Nuttall begins his study of William Shakespeare – an attempt at a recovery, in its own way – with an imaginative reconstruction of the writer’s reality. In Stratford he thinks: ‘The author of the best plays ever written must often have walked in the street in which I was standing.’ There is something vertiginous about that sort of recognition which is hard to bring home in words.

I would not presume to fault those – all of us, of course; it’s all of us – who have appropriated, transformed, or re-formed Shakespeare. It is in duality that the value of a palimpsest lies, in old and new together. But as the engines of our cultural hysteria settle comfortably into overdrive, I want to suggest that there may be value in separating ‘Shakespeare’ from Shakespeare. 450 years ago, give or take a few days, a baby boy was born and drew his first breath. 52 years later a wealthy man, renowned, familial, bald or at least balding, drew his last. It may have been a painful breath, or ragged, his lungs heaving like broken bellows. Perhaps it was then that Condell and Heminges began thinking of the First Folio, with whose publication seven years later his legacy was secured; and Shakespeare, as he expired, was already being given a new and different lease on life.