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Page 22 himself—would have expressed him or herself in daily life as Hamlet does. Indeed, Shakespeare is called on to underwrite all types of projects, even those that already bear his name. On the back of the box of Kenneth Branagh’s production of Hamlet, the film is advertised as “Shakespeare’s greatest creation in its entirety.” The claim is, of course, false because Branagh’s script is a conflation of the quarto and folio texts and is therefore not “Shakespeare’s creation” as such. However, the need to have Shakespeare authorize the Hollywood film is powerful: it simply sounds much better to speak of “Shakespeare’s greatest creation” than of Branagh’s conflation. The cultural power that sustains the type of claim made for Branagh’s video and by Prince Charles in the newspaper beguiles many readers, including academics who have otherwise learned to resist unabashed bardolatry.7 We could discuss here the incredible number of books published on Shakespeare each year, the number of journals solely devoted to Shakespeare criticism, the number of English departments that still require a class in Shakespeare for all their majors, or the fact that Terry Eagleton, although a Marxist critic, fully understands that even a slight book on Shakespeare is far more marketable than a tome on the politically more radical Brecht or Milton. Even those who would argue against Shakespeare’s centrality and special status cannot help but bask in his cultural aura. A fictional story illustrates the significance of Shakespeare’s name best. In his novel Changing Places, David Lodge has a group of academics play a game, which goes as follows: everyone has to confess before the group the most canonical work he or she has not read, and the player who names the most canonical text wins the game. Of course, the contest pits against one another two extremely potent academic impulses: the desire to appear well-read before one’s peers and the desire to outdo one’s peers. One particularly competitive untenured Assistant Professor confesses that he has not read Hamlet. Needless to say, he wins the game, but shortly thereafter is turned down for tenure. The point of the story is that in the body of canonical literature no text is more canonical than Hamlet, and to confess ignorance of it disqualifies the Assistant Professor in the eyes of his tenured colleagues from a permanent position among the academic initiated. He has not claimed the requisite portion or relic of the Shakespearean body; he has not partaken of the academic Eucharist and is not privy to the mysteries of transubstantiation, of turning the liter- |
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