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and Jane Smiley now write against Shakespeare, either denying his influence altogether, or openly resisting it; they see him as a conservative figure. So too does Hollywood, although Disney and Kenneth Branagh capitalize on his cultural conservatism rather than resisting it. Romance novelists, at the bottom of the cultural food chain, continue to mine Shakespeare for authority-by-association; but even in that most despised of contemporary literary forms, Shakespeare synecdochically represents a patriarchal social order.

Things are not any better when we leave the classroom for the green room. Shakespeareans may protest: what about the new Globe Theatre, yet another monument to Shakespeare in the heart of Europe’s largest city? But that new monument to Shakespeare in its 1998 season offered only two plays from the Shakespeare canon— alongside two from the Middleton canon. The Middleton plays got better reviews.

Well, what about the Royal Shakespeare Company? Charles Spencer, reviewing the 1998 season of that “beleaguered, debt-ridden company,” asks, “Is the RSC bored with Shakespeare? …once again the Shakespeare productions range from the adequate to the disgraceful” (Spencer 1998). Another reviewer describes most recent Stratford productions as “routine and dismal: either bored novelty-for-novelty’s-sake (like the current Twelfth Night) or echoing empty middle-of-the-road fare (like the current Merchant of Venice)” (P.Taylor 1998). Virtually the same complaints were being made at the same time about ‘‘the other Stratford.” Wildly praised in the 1990s for its productions of plays like Long Day’s Journey into Night and Waiting for Godot, Ontario’s Stratford Festival has been stridently attacked for “pedestrian” or “outrageously overproduced” Shakespeare (Coulbourne 1998; K.Taylor 1998). For the Stratford Festival, as for the RSC, the mid-1980s represented a decisive turning point, a crisis of decline after two decades of expansion. Our most prestigious Shakespearean theaters have both been overwhelmed by the mechanical demand to re-produce the same plays, over and over again. Audiences seem to be interested in only a limited number of Shakespeare’s works, but they also get tired of seeing those plays performed ad nauseam (Taylor 1999).

This problem is not limited to the two major companies. Increasingly, members of the American Association of Shakespeare Festivals are having to confine themselves to the dozen plays with name recognition. The Alabama Shakespeare Festival, with the largest endowment of any U.S. company, performs only three Shakespeare

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