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Page 205 that has such people in it!” (referring to 5.1.186–87). This last exclamation (slightly misquoted) is virtually the climax of the book; we are not invited to remember Prospero’s sardonic rejoinder, “’Tis new to thee” (5.1.188). If even learned clerks and witty writers quote Shakespeare less inventively, less accurately, and less often than of yore, you may imagine how his price has fallen in vulgar company. The Shakespeare industry will no doubt dismiss Wilson, Mamet, and Gould as in some way “unrepresentative” of our time. They have to be, because Shakespeare is “immortal.” He has been repeatedly declared so since 1623, when Ben Jonson claimed that Shakespeare’s plays were ‘‘not of an age, but for all time!” (Shakespeare 1986:xlv). “All time” is a long time. Will Shakespeare’s plays last longer than the earth? Longer than the sun? Five billion years? Five million? Five thousand? Next to five billion, five thousand may sound trivial, but the works of Homer are not even three thousand years old. Shakespeare, as yet, hasn’t even lasted five hundred. I come to measure Shakespeare, not to bury him. Here is my end-of-millennium prophecy: as long as the English language survives, people will be reading or listening to Shakespeare. They will be doing to Shakespeare what Shakespeare did to Plautus in The Comedy of Errors, expropriating what they can use, often without acknowledgment. But the number of people attending to Shakespeare, the intensity of their attention, the frequency and complexity of their appropriations, will inevitably diminish. Even now, if Shakespeare were not so massively supported by corporate capital and government subsidy, if he were not forced upon schoolchildren, would he still loom so large in our culture? Or would he collapse to the status of Chaucer? A great writer, admired by specialists, but paid little attention by the larger world. The collapse of Shakespeare is hard to imagine. But then, who could have imagined how easily the Berlin Wall would collapse? Who could have imagined, twenty years ago, the shrinking of the Soviet Union? Already in our classical theaters the shrinking of Shakespeare has created more room for other playwrights. As Shakespeare gets smaller, the available cultural space for other writers—for Gloria Naylor, or Jane Smiley, or Thomas Middleton— gets bigger. Why should we confine our admiration to a single writer? Polybardolatry, anyone? |
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