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Page 21 growing longer every day. Shakespeare is where the “money’’ is— sometimes quite literally. When, as an ambitious graduate student, I edited Shakespeare Left and Right for Routledge Press, one of my professors was quite taken aback by the size of my advance. He wrote to Oxford University Press and asked why he was getting less for his new book on Oscar Wilde than his student was getting for a mere essay collection. I thought it was a good question. The Oxford editor answered simply: Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s centrality in our universities is, of course, partly driven by his centrality in our culture, where his name carries tremendous weight and where he is still held up as an icon of good taste, cultural refinement, and intellectual ability (see Bristol 1990 and 1996; Taylor 1989). In 1989, to use a particularly silly yet instructive example, the Prince of Wales used Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy to demonstrate the appalling decline of the English language from Shakespeare’s day to the present. In an Associated Press article, the Prince rewrites the soliloquy in what (he thinks) is modern slang: Well, frankly, the problem as I see it At this moment is whether I Should just lie down under all this hassle And let them walk all over me, Or, whether I should just say: “OK, I get the message,” and do myself in. I mean, let’s face it, I’m in a no-win Situation, and quite honestly, I’m so stuffed up to here with the whole Stupid mess that, I can tell you, I’ve just Got a good mind to take the quick way out. That’s the bottom line. The only problem is: What happens if I find that when I’ve bumped Myself off, there’s some kind of a, you know, All that mystical stuff about when you die, You might find you’re still—know what I mean? (Charles 1989) We may wonder in precisely what part of the British Empire Charles’s rendition of Shakespeare passes for “slang,” but the more important point is that the Prince of Wales can call on Shakespeare to chastise young people’s speech. It apparently eludes Charles entirely that no one in Shakespeare’s time—including Shakespeare |
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