The report a few weeks ago from the National Alumni Forum seemed quite alarming:"A new study reveals that two-thirds of 70 leading colleges and universities have dropped the Shakespeare requirement for English majors. The study shows that taking the great poet’s place are courses on popular culture and sex.” Sex instead of Shakespeare? How shocking!
But before the intellectual lynch mob starts assembling for a march to save the Bard from perverted English professors, people should check the facts: The claims made by the National Alumni Forum are simply false, and the information about requirements for English majors has been misrepresented to the public. The forum’s much-publicized count of 23 understated the number of colleges where English majors are required to read Shakespeare.
In the text of its report,"The Shakespeare File: What English Majors Are Really Studying,” the forum claimed that it had given English departments the benefit of the doubt in its tabulations. It said, for example,"We have assumed that at least some selections from the Great Authors are read in survey courses.”
This is a reasonable assumption -- but the report then fails to include colleges with such courses among the number that ask students to read Shakespeare. Ten institutions, including Vanderbilt University, require a survey class such as “Representative English Writers” in which, the forum’s report said, it assumed"Shakespeare is taught.” Counting these 10 would give us 33, rather than 23, institutions where Shakespeare is required. The report also observes that,"while Yale, for example, does not require Shakespeare, it does require three courses prior to 1800 where we assume students will be introduced to the Bard.” For the record, Yale actually requires four courses on pre-1800 literature. Nor does the report count the nine other colleges among the 70 surveyed that require three such courses. Counting those 10 brings to 43 the total number of institutions among the 70 surveyed where the Bard is required study for English majors.
Apparently someone at the alumni forum decided at the last minute that the report would be more alarming if it found that Shakespeare was required at only 23 colleges, rather than 43 -- but failed to remove the language covering the other 20 institutions from the body of the report.
Actually, to measure realistically how many colleges have requirements that make virtually all English majors read Shakespeare, we should also add in the nine colleges of the 70 that require two classes in pre-1800 literature, since it is hard to imagine more than a handful of their English majors reading not a word of Shakespeare in these courses. And then there’s Columbia University, where all students are required to read Shakespeare in the core curriculum.
When these numbers are put together, the total is at least 53, not 23 -- hardly a crisis. And, in fact, it is highly probable that English majors in the remaining 17 colleges studied by the forum have read some Shakespeare: A 1991-92 survey of English departments by the Modern Language Association found that 97.3 per cent of four-year institutions offered a course in his works.
The same survey found that 60.8 per cent of four-year institutions required English majors to take a Shakespeare course, an increase from the 54.2 per cent that required one in 1984-85. Thus, it is clearly not“the norm” for English departments to drop Shakespeare requirements, as the forum (which conducted no historical study) claimed.
But the oversights and misrepresentation in the report were never mentioned by the journalists and columnists who wrote about it. Perhaps they were influenced by the many famous people cited in the forum’s press release as endorsing the study. Yet one wonders if many of those"names” had read the report.
The Nobel laureate Saul Bellow declared,"To restore Shakespeare to the high-school curriculum would work wonders,” seemingly unaware that Shakespeare remains by far the most commonly assigned author in high school -- or that the forum’s report focuses exclusively on colleges.
Robert Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre, contended that"most English departments are now held so completely hostage to fashionable political and theoretical agendas that it is unlikely Shakespeare can qualify as an appropriate author.” Never mind that the M.L.A.'s on-line bibliography shows 19,775 entries on Shakespeare -- more than three times the number of items about runner-up James Joyce (5,712) and far more than the number devoted to Toni Morrison (544), Foucault (661), or cultural studies (532).
Even Moses himself had an opinion: Charlton Heston commented, “Universities without Shakespeare? Unthinkable. Language without Shakespeare? Unspeakable.” Indeed, it is unthinkable and unspeakable -- and, fortunately, it isn’t happening except in the overactive imaginations of conservative critics who see study of Shakespeare as the litmus test of what they believe is culturally correct.
While other literary icons, such as Milton and George Eliot, have seen their literary stars fade somewhat in recent years, Shakespeare actually remains the unchallenged king of the hill. Why, then, has a Shakespeare"crisis” been invented? Conservative critics of academe deeply fear (and exaggerate) the curricular changes in recent decades that reflect the growing importance of multiculturalism in literary study. To them, Shakespeare is sacred, and suggesting that students might want to read something else is like taking a Harlequin romance to church.
For all of its claims about popular culture"replacing” Shakespeare, the National Alumni Forum’s report failed to document a single college where English majors are required to take even one class on popular culture. What distresses the forum is that professors are permitted to teach, and students are permitted to take, elective classes dealing with such topics as detective fiction, Beatnik and 1950s literature, protest literature, and postcolonial theory.
The report is particularly offended by courses studying sex, which it calls"the most popular” of popular culture. It lists 15 classes taught at American colleges that deal with sexuality and literature, feminist analysis, and queer theory. Based on these 15 classes, Suzanne Fields, the syndicated conservative columnist, declared:"Literature professors seem to be obsessed with carnality in their course descriptions.” As the headline of an Indianapolis Star editorial aptly put it,"Sex vs. Shakespeare.”
The irony of these complaints is that Shakespeare himself (like his canonic buddy, Chaucer) was censored a century ago, when self-appointed literary critics, the Bill Bennetts of their day, decided that there was too much sex, violence, and coarseness in his plays. Shakespeare’s sex scenes are now safely encased within the literary canon, and the Puritans have moved on to new targets. Today, the academic interest in sexuality (which can’t even begin to compare in size to the knowledge industry known as Shakespearean studies) shocks the sensibilities of these self-appointed guardians of"our” culture, who wish to ban certain classes based on the offensiveness of their titles.
Of course, the suggestion that professors shouldn’t be allowed to discuss certain ideas in their classes has the unfortunate taint of McCarthyism. That’s why increasing graduation requirements has become the latest conservative crusade. It’s far more acceptable to force students to read the Great Books of the West than overtly to try to prevent professors from talking about other kinds of books.
I will admit to a personal bias in questioning the necessity of Shakespeare requirements. As an undergraduate, I could have graduated with an additional B.A., in rhetoric, had I not refused to take one required class: the works of Shakespeare. How was I supposed to know that I was part of the decline of academe? As a young person, I’d had enough of the Bard. In high school, I’d taken a class exclusively on Shakespeare, in addition to the traditional English-literature survey where we read many of his sonnets and four of his plays. I decided that there was more to life -- even a literary life -- than Shakespeare.
I’m not Shakespeare-phobic, mind you. I’ve seen far more plays by Shakespeare -- on stage and screen -- than by any other writer, and read more works by him than by any other single author, except perhaps Plato. I’ve taken a graduate course devoted exclusively to Shakespeare, and I’ve been at dinner parties where we read entire plays aloud -- the most entertaining and valuable way to study his works.
As a culture, we are wallowing in Shakespeare. Every year brings new film adaptations, including Baz Lurhmann’s hit Romeo and Juliet, Ian McKellan’s acclaimed Richard III, Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard, Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night, and the full-length, four-hour Hamlet by Kenneth Branagh, following Mel Gibson’s earlier attempt at the role. And you can hardly go to a park in the summer anymore without stumbling on some mediocre production of one of his plays.
Shakespeare doesn’t need to be saved from English professors; he’s the greatest writer in the history of the English language, and he survives pretty well without coercive cheerleading on his behalf. Instead, his good name needs to be rescued from those who invoke it to malign higher education and spread misinformation to propagandize for a very narrow view of what should be allowed in English departments.
The Shakespeare Scare reflects how the culture wars have come to be dominated by public-relations campaigns rather than intellectual debates. The media, including the supposedly liberal New York Times, essentially printed the National Alumni Forum’s press release without a word of critique. Thanks to the eagerness of the forum to bash academe, millions of people across the country now believe yet another false statement about English departments.
We need to debate recent changes in the curriculum and to examine what effects they have on students’ learning. However, misstating simple facts doesn’t generate anything beyond anger and distrust. People on all sides of the culture wars desire a serious study of the curriculum. But this Shakespeare Scare is built on gross exaggeration, and it shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone.
John K. Wilson is a graduate student in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and author of The Myth of Political Correctness (Duke University Press, 1995) and Newt Gingrich: Capitol Crimes and Misdemeanors (Common Courage Press, 1996).