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pop-culture-addict adolescents because he recognized that every American teenager is required to read Romeo and Juliet. Hence its exploitation in another Hollywood success story, 1998’s Shakespeare in Love, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet which has the further advantage of reproducing only the most famous bits of Shakespeare’s play, suspended in a solution of anachronistic romantic comedy, real breasts, chase scenes, and gorgeous costumes. Shakespeare in starland is indeed “neither more nor less essential to consumers than Bugs Bunny” (Bristol 1996:233).

But unlike Bugs Bunny, Shakespeare receives a massive government subsidy. In 1765, Samuel Johnson cited as the best evidence for Shakespeare’s genius the fact that his works were then “read without any other reason than the desire of pleasure” and were “therefore praised only as pleasure is obtained”; the author’s reputation was ‘‘unassisted by interest or passion” (1958:7:61). This is, of course, no longer true. Shakespeare is now usually read “without any other reason than the desire” for a passing grade, and his reputation is continually assisted by the self-interest and passion of Shakespearean apparatchiks—cultural bureaucrats who, like myself, make a living off his reputation. A text can only belong to everybody if everybody is forced to adopt it. Universality, never the product of free choice, can only be imposed by totalitarian means. And that very imposition of a text itself creates resistance to it. As a result, even when Shakespeare is taught, he doesn’t stick. People don’t internalize him, the way they used to.

Most Americans know by heart a few tags from Shakespeare’s plays, even if they have not read them. A man on the street interviewed in New York by Al Pacino for his documentary Looking for Richard, or a Congressman in Washington D.C. providing sound bites for the six o’clock news, can quote or parody the same rusty speech from Hamlet (“B2, or not B2”). But neither the man on the street nor the politician trying to impress the man on the street would be likely to quote Virgil, Ovid, or Seneca, as Shakespeare did. The Greek and Roman classics have become less quotable, not because their style has changed, or their genius diminished, but simply because their readership has declined; their phrases are no longer in circulation. And Shakespeare’s own good words are planted in fewer memories than they once were: he has become, like caviar, familiar to the General but arcane in the ranks.

It was not always so. In 1752, William Dodd published the first of many anthologies of The Beauties of Shakespear (1971); for the next

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