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ary body into academic capital. As Harold Bloom observes in his brand new tome on Shakespeare, Hamlet’s ‘‘effect upon the world’s culture is incalculable. After Jesus, Hamlet is the most cited figure in Western consciousness; no one prays to him, but no one evades him for long either” (1998b:xix). As Bloom concludes, “If any author has become a mortal God, it must be Shakespeare” (3). Lodge’s Assistant Professor learns this the hard way.

To study Shakespeare professionally is to become initiated; it is to learn the secret handshake, to join the old boys’ club (which now counts a significant number of powerful women among its members), to become associated with our culture’s most potent literary name, and to have access instantly to the vast network of institutions and people that have been created around the name of Shakespeare. In time this may change, but I do not see any evidence of it changing just yet; feminists, Marxists, and cultural materialists seem very much at home these days in the reading rooms of the Folger Shakespeare Library—and I do not see any of them trying to tear the place down, the way Protestant reformers smashed Catholic icons, nor close it down as Stalin did the churches. At four o’clock you might see radical critics sipping their tea without so much as a word about plots to finish off literature and destroy the national mind. In fact, they might be discussing the new Norton edition of the collected works of Shakespeare, a text designed specifically for classroom use by a small group of Marxists, feminists, and new historicists, which—the truth be told—is a monument to the playwright’s staying power and cultural cachet. Clearly, the name Shakespeare has such resonance and potency, such power to enhance whatever agenda or product we are pushing (be it the revolution or Starkist Tuna),8 that it cannot be left unexploited, unappropriated—by the Left or the Right.

Is literary studies, then, simply the Kampfplatz in which only the fittest critics will stand after the war? Probably not, though there will be some casualties. Every reading of a Shakespeare play, we need to keep reminding ourselves, is already an appropriation, an interpretation that is limited only by the constraints that our academic institutions, journals, and university presses place on it. And the interpretive models we use are so varied, so inconsistent, so incomplete, and so contradictory, that in and of themselves they do not drive academic readers of Shakespeare into any compelling direction when trying to determine the meaning of the plays. Though at times literary criticism has aspired to scientific status, protocols

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