If Shakespeare were alive ...

Shakespeare’s diversity in America

By Suzanne Fields

The politically incorrect Bard would outrage the modern campus

If Shakespeare were alive and invited to give the commencement address at a major American university, the favorite spring sport on campus would explode with loud and shrill protest.

• Blacks could object to Othello, the angry, “erring barbarian” wife-murderer. Jews could protest Shylock, the stereotypical Jewish money lender demanding his pound of flesh. 
• Ageists would decry a senile Lear. 
• Feminists would despise Lady Macbeth, the Bard’s most powerful woman, as a power-seeking termagant.
• And besides all that, he’s a very dead white man. 

Of course, taking offense would require the students to have a modest familiarity with Shakespeare. The Bard is not as well-read in America as he once was. Celebrating the 450th year of his birth, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington this week presented a lecture by scholar James Shapiro on his new book, “Shakespeare in America.” He regaled the audience with wonderful stories of how Shakespeare was once a touchstone of our cultural heritage.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed of America in the 1830s that “there is hardly a pioneer hut in which the odd volume of Shakespeare cannot be found. I remember reading the feudal drama “Henry V” for the first time in a log cabin.” Shakespeare’s popularity depends now on where and how you live.

When Mr. Shapiro talked to prisoners on Rikers Island in New York, the prisoners wanted to know “how many plays did Shakespeare write, and is he still alive?”

The trend of the universities burying Shakespeare with Milton and Chaucer as undeserving white men is subsiding, but the professoriate’s submerging Shakespeare and Milton in a crowd of lesser works in the name of “diversity” is shocking to anyone who came of age before the academics diluted the liberal arts.

In a forward to “Shakespeare in America,” Bill Clinton remembers that as a high school student in “one of those nineteenth-century frontier towns — Hot Springs, Arkansas,” he was required to memorize 100 lines from Macbeth, including the final soliloquy with the phrase “sound and fury” that William Faulkner took as the title for a novel.

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