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for Bourdieu, “shared artificial memories create a kind of ‘cultural capital’ that distinguishes social classes far more effectively than lineage or income” (Taylor 1996:186).

It is easy to demonize popular culture and even the culture industry, but Shakespeare’s ideological function looks equally suspect from the ivory towers of academe. Hugh Grady (1991) and Terence Hawkes (1996:1–16) uncover a residue of modernism in professional Shakespeare studies and, by implication, in the university curricula supervised by professional critics; the university therefore participates in the modernist impulse to collapse historical and geographic distance into a false universality and so frustrates “truth’s” effort to ambush reader/writers “like a grotesque.” John Guillory (1993) argues as well that institutions exist first and foremost to reproduce themselves, and educational institutions are no exception. The syllabus or curriculum therefore becomes a “fetish,’’ an object venerated without reference to its cultural or even institutional function. Ivo Kamps’s essay testifies to the fact that the college classroom, while a place of discussion, rarely produces revolution. Finally, in Meaning by Shakespeare, Terence Hawkes analyzes the ways in which those of us who critique “Bardbiz” also participate in the Shakespeare industry as critics, teachers, and editors (1992:141–53).

II Appropriation in practice

Ros:  What’s the game?

Guil:  What are the rules?

(Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

The recognition that the self, values, and reality are not only socially constructed, but inexorably shaped by culture at its most conservative, is a daunting one. Foucault argued that the concept of “authorship” comes into existence at that moment when writers can be punished for discourse, or when writing becomes subject to censorship and cultural surveillance. But authorship must also then be grounded in the belief that discourse can be transgressive. The notion of transgression and its rhetorical counterpart, communion, are the terms around which small-time Shakespeare, or local acts of appropriation, are organized.

Current accounts of literary influence are often grounded in metaphors of conflict, a dialectic between transgression and sub-

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