Reports of the Bard’s Demise Are Premature

Alas, poor Shakespeare, we knew him well.

That was the baleful cry from conservative critics as they watched the Bard disappear from required reading lists across the country, part of a wave of revisionism as colleges embraced multiculturalism.

Two-thirds of the nation’s top 70 universities no longer insist that English majors take a Shakespeare course, according to one recent study. More schools are considering whether to follow suit.

To conservatives, this is political correctness run amok, an academic misstep with high stakes: no less than the cultural legacy of the greatest author in the English language.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the downfall of Western civilization.

Shakespeare is not only surviving, but thriving on college campuses. Elective classes devoted to the Bard are bulging at the seams. More scholastic anthologies and critical studies are being churned out than ever before.

“Samuel Johnson said in 1765 that people read Shakespeare because they want to, not because they have to,” said Gary Taylor, a nationally known Bard scholar at the University of Alabama. “That’s his measure of the greatness of Shakespeare.”

The playwright’s resilience has shed fresh light on the debate over what should be taught in American colleges, particularly as the effects of campus squabbles over curriculum begin to emerge across the country.

Some academicians say the trend toward more inclusive studies has scored a victory--and proved conservatives’ fears of a dumbing down of America to be unfounded. Great thinkers, writers and artists, they say, will withstand time--and curriculum changes--just fine.

“The major Western figures are still there and still getting the largest enrollments,” said Susan Lewis, director of Harvard’s core curriculum, the slate of general education offerings the school revised in 1979.

“Students are going for the things that critics think of as very traditional and in danger of falling off the map.”

In art courses, undergraduates still flock to Michelangelo, Lewis said. In music, Beethoven. In philosophy, Plato. And in literature, Shakespeare.

But critics remain unmoved. Popularity is not the point, they counter, but rather priority and principle. Making Shakespeare optional for English majors strikes some as academic knavery.

“Would you accept the answer that in medical school, we don’t require anatomy because we expect most students to take it anyway?” asked Jerry L. Martin, president of the National Alumni Forum, a conservative Washington educational think tank. “You’re defining what an M.D. is when you make your requirements, and you’re defining what an English major is when you make your requirements.”

*

To use the Bard as a case study in the brouhaha over college liberal arts is tricky. No other author can compare when it comes to influence on English letters and society or the ability to transcend time and space.

To some, however, that is precisely the point: Shakespeare continues to endure even when the door to the traditional canon and Western education opens wider to admit others who have gone ignored or neglected for years.

“As a good writer, he should be able to survive in a free market,” said Alabama’s Taylor, who voted to abandon a Shakespeare requirement for English majors while at Brandeis University several years ago. “Conservatives in every other respect are demanding that we let the market decide, that we not regulate the choices that people make. Yet when it comes to culture, there is this tendency to insist that we force people to read what we think will be good for them.”

Critics disagree, contending that Shakespeare’s patrimony is too important to be left to the laws of supply and demand.

In December, Martin’s organization, which is headed by Lynne Cheney, the former chief of the National Endowment for the Humanities, published a report that showed two-thirds of America’s 70 top colleges do not require English students to study Shakespeare.

“What is taking Shakespeare’s place?” the report asked. As answers, it cited classes on advertising imagery, Madonna lyrics, Internet ‘zines and “Queer Fiction”--the title of a course at Amherst College.

“This country cannot expect a generation raised on gangster films and sex studies to maintain its leadership in the world. Or even its unity as a nation,” wrote Martin.

The report was spawned by a dispute at Georgetown University, where the English faculty last spring scrapped a requirement that majors study at least two of the language’s three giants--Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare. Instead, starting with the class of 1999, students will choose one of three sub-specialties, including “literature and literary history,” “culture and performance,” and “writing.” None will require a course dedicated to the Bard.

Critics howled. “The unkindest cut of all,” read one newspaper account. “Et tu, Georgetown?” lamented another.

The Georgetown English department, attacked by outraged students, scholars and even local actors, defended its decision by noting that Shakespeare’s profile on campus stays high.

“Shakespeare remains a major part of the life of the English program, with nine courses devoted exclusively to Shakespeare offered at Georgetown in 1996-97,” university spokeswoman Sandra Hvidsten said. “The new curriculum removes nothing that had been available before the changes.”

Other experts agree that even when not de rigeur, the Bard still commands respect and fills attendance sheets. A federal sampling of more than 20,000 college transcripts five years ago showed that the proportion of undergraduates taking Shakespeare from 1972 to 1982 stayed virtually the same from 1982 to 1992--the period when the revision of Western civilization curricula began.

The Modern Language Assn., in a 1992 survey, found that universities were teaching as many or more sections of Shakespeare as before. Such demand has prompted what scholastic publishers call an unprecedented number of critical studies and collections of Shakespeare’s works, such as an anthology due out this week from W.W. Norton & Co. with an impressive first run of 30,000 copies.

“Shakespeare is so well-established as a major writer in our society that serious students of literature choose to study Shakespeare,” said Phyllis Franklin, executive director of MLA. “They don’t have to be forced into it.”

At Cal State Northridge, senior Sarah Loffler agrees. She enrolled in a Shakespeare overview course last fall and a “Shakespeare and Film” seminar this semester, even though the university does not require English majors to take a class on the Bard.

“Whether or not it was required wasn’t the question. It was a requirement I put on myself,” Loffler said. “I don’t think he’ll ever lose his following. He is a must, just as in music you’d say that Mozart is a must.”

In the same way, many scholars say, serious pursuit of other fields will also lead students to engage the traditional greats in subject areas such as philosophy or math or art.

“Education should be geared to help people to do the best they can,” said Princeton professor Lawrence Danson. “You can say, ‘You must do something,’ or you can say, ‘Here are terrific things, and you’re going to love doing this.’ Experience here shows that that’s a better way to go.”

But at a time when a college education can cost six figures, conservative critics say, strong requirements to lay a proper academic foundation must remain in place, not be left up for grabs for young people whose judgment may not be so informed or who must grapple with everyday realities like scheduling conflicts.

Christina Marin, a senior in English at Cal State Northridge, likes Shakespeare, but found her course list too crowded to allow for a course on the playwright.

“There’s a lot of classes I missed that way. My schedule dictates everything,” Marin said, adding that she has been exposed to Shakespeare through her involvement in theater and other classes, like “Eroticism in Literature.” (They studied “Othello.”)

Watching Shakespeare fall through the cracks like this is what critics want to avoid.

The National Alumni Forum study salutes UCLA, for instance, praising the Westwood campus for “setting a standard for rigor” for English students. English majors must take not one but two Shakespeare courses, as well as classes on Milton and Chaucer.

“I doubt that there are many people, if truth be known, who wouldn’t agree that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language,” said Eric Sundquist, chairman of UCLA’s English department. “If that is true, then why not demand acquaintance with his work?”

But Sundquist also sees room in his department for the kind of classes the National Alumni Forum describes as better suited to the sociology and political science departments. In addition to well-worn classics, UCLA students can study science fiction, gay and lesbian literature, children’s books and Celtic mythology.

“The virtue of our program is that we have a good mix of opportunities for our students,” Sundquist said. “We give them the option to do innovative work in innovative areas, but at the same time we require them to have a good foundation in British and American literature. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“There’s room for everything,” said Herbert Lindenberger, professor of English and comparative literature at Stanford, which caused a stir when it became one of the first to jettison its Western civics course of study in 1988. “I just don’t see this as a problem.

“Those conservative studies . . . seem to want to discredit contemporary students, whom they don’t respect for the choices they make. I rather respect my students.”

And, Lindenberger says, perhaps the greatest irony of all is that the Bard, so celebrated in modern times, was considered popular culture in his day 400 years ago.

For two centuries, his tragedies, histories and comedies were not deemed worthy of serious academic study or inclusion in the canon of great works. Only sermons and Greek and Latin classics were acceptable literary subjects, scholars say.

“It’s fascinating how Shakespeare has been picked on as a kind of sacred figure,” Lindenberger said. “It wasn’t till the 19th century that he was accepted as an uncompromisingly great figure.”

And the current flap over his fate in the hands of 20th century English departments? Many believe it’s much ado about nothing.

“It’s hard for me to believe there’s any English major anywhere who hasn’t read some Shakespeare. He’s taught all over the place,” Lindenberger said. “Shakespeare has survived canon changes better than any other single author.”