Cornell English and the Shakespeare Boom

Reviewers, cultural theorists and all my colleagues in renaissance studies (or to use an alternate historical term, early modern studies) tell me we're in the middle of a Shakespeare boom. A Shakespeare boom sounds like a housing boom--something that will eventually go bust. But Shakespeare studies and productions aren't the sort of thing that have to go down because they're up. And Shakespeare is indeed up these days. According to Walter Cohen, who teaches courses like Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century and is an editor of the prestigious Norton Shakespeare, the number, variety and quality of editions available for purchase is unprecedented, suggesting that far more people are buying works of Shakespeare than ever before. Theatrical and film productions and adaptations abound. Despite hundreds of years of interpretation, scholarship keeps revealing more, using new historical documents and contexts and illuminating new theoretical approaches. And perhaps most obviously, Shakespeare is up in the number of classes offered and students in them.

I know that Shakespeare classes are flourishing in English departments of our peer institutions because I'm in touch with many of the chairs of these departments. And of course as Chair of the English department at Cornell I know that they are flourishing here. To consider only classes wholly on Shakespeare offered this academic year, we have nine freshman seminars, two large sophomore level lecture-discussions, one junior level lecture, and a senior seminar on the Greek and Roman plays. That's 14 undergraduate classes, and I'm not even counting those in which Shakespearean texts figure prominently among other texts of the period, like Philip Lorenz's Blood Politics or Barbara Correll's graduate seminar Love, Loss and Lament in the Renaissance.

But are there more offerings and kinds of offerings now than in the venerable past of this department? I sent our undergraduate research assistant Camden Jenkins off to look through old Cornell catalogues. He checked out two three-year periods during a time when a larger percentage of undergraduates were English majors than ever before or since: 1960-63 and 1970-73. The results in many respects run counter to popular conceptions of a golden age of traditional study--and even counter to the memories of some alumni I've talked to. In the 1960-63 period the English department routinely offered four courses on Shakespeare per year and these only at the junior, senior and graduate levels. In the 1970-73 period, there were five courses per year, two at the sophomore level and the rest for majors and graduate students. Our understanding that freshmen can--and want to--study Shakespeare is of fairly recent date. As Jenny Mann observes, "These seminars regularly draw a broad cross-section of the undergraduate student body." As a consequence, "I have the opportunity to work with students who will not major in English, but who are nevertheless enthusiastic about studying Shakespeare's works."

Shakespeare not just for English majors? Not even just for students in the College of Arts and Sciences? Barbara Correll and Stuart Davis, who teach popular sophomore-level lecture-discussion classes, note that students come to Cornell already looking forward to reading Shakespeare plays and non-dramatic poems and viewing Shakespeare productions on stage or in films. And as Correll notes, they're ready to go further. "They respond to my encouragement to ask questions of the assigned plays, to see them as complex and thought-provoking texts about the relationship between past and present." Davis explains that the extremely popular Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century "takes stage and screen--with their performances, tradaptations, and offshoots of Shakespeare--seriously." He notes that representations of Shakespearean texts--and fictional versions of "Shakespeare"--saturate popular as well as high culture, showing up on tote bags and coffee cups, in major films like Shakespeare in Love and in 1996 on the cover of Newsweek as "Dead White Male of the Year."

"Shakespeare is in fact a little bit too 'familiar,'" says Philip Lorenz, who explains that sometimes students come with "a prepared understanding of the plays." Like his colleagues, Lorenz can cite numerous examples of pundits who quote lines ludicrously out of context. But because a canned version of Shakespeare can be "too 'familiar,'" Lorenz says that "when students actually read the plays on the page as well as on the stage or screen, the encounter has a wonderful de-familiarizing effect." Far from being mouthpieces for what you always thought, Shakespearean characters surprise and shock as much as they did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Shakespeare is for viewing as well as reading, and all the renaissance faculty stress the importance for their teaching of Cornell's extraordinary library resources (including the huge Theatre in Video data base) and live productions. Rayna Kalas urges her students "to bring their experiences as an audience to the study of texts that were originally written for the stage," and points to the regular productions at the Schwarz center or at Risley theater--at least one Shakespeare play, and usually more, on campus every year. Philip Lorenz notes that the words theater and theory come from the same root, meaning "viewing," and stresses that productions help students realize that in the plays "thought is active, staged, performed."

Given all this activity and excitement in the Cornell English Department around Shakespeare studies, I was a little puzzled when during the last reunion an alumna approached me to ask why the department "didn't still require a Shakespeare class for the major."

Still? I sent Camden to the old catalogues to look at English course requirements. He read back to 1940. At least since 1940 Cornell's English department has never required a Shakespeare class for the major.

Why required? I brooded more over that idea. The idea of requiring a Shakespeare course sounded a bit like requiring a spoonful of cod liver oil. It tastes terrible but it will do you good. Shakespeare apparently tastes terrific. The truth is that Shakespeare classes are more like pizza. We don't require students to eat pizza, but they do. They really, really like it.