Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity ed. by Sharon O'Dair and Timothy Francisco (review)

It was the Occupy movement of September 2011 that coined the phrase "We are the 99%." The takeover of Zuccotti Park stimulated demonstrators in eighty nations to occupy public spaces, protesting against the obscene polarization of wealth engineered by contemporary capitalism. The cutthroat corporate world enriching the tiny few now has its hand on the windpipe of universities, argue the thirteen writers in this volume, and the teaching of Shakespeare is losing life fast. What links galloping economic maldistribution to a particular sliver of literary criticism is, for these writers, the hegemony of neoliberalism. Its hostility to public sector spending and endless demands for tax cuts, mean, as Craig Dionne explains, that the dwindling of "state coffers forces legislatures to pay colleges less out of its annual budgets, forcing schools to increase tuition to make up the slack, which in turn makes higher education a debtor's prison for generations of working families" (255). Neoliberal obsession with commodification, combined with fetishizing stem disciplines, leaves the Humanities looking quaintly irrelevant. "Trends in American life," Denise Albanese recognizes, "have argued with ever-greater insistence that education is, and should be, jobs training, and the humanities a kind of ornament without profit" (31). Where once an education in Shakespeare bestowed a prestigious credential on the middle classes, in today's corporate philistinism immersion in his plays offers misfit cultural capital. Deft quotation from Hamlet will not clinch the job in an interview. As corporate values of profit-maximization increasingly displace academic veneration of knowledge for its own sake, departments compete angrily for funding: low enrollments can mean for an English department cutting, even eliminating, the research and travel budget. As Humanities professors scramble to invent sexy titles in desperate enrollment competition, the "silliest part," notes Dionne, is that "the student, the consumer, decides what classes are important, not the faculty" (255). "Who profits from this system? Citizens Bank. Wells Fargo"—institutions, that is, that work with the university to turn students into "consumers of loans" (256). As students stagger away beneath mountains of debt to poorly paying jobs, "Professors can sometimes feel like hustlers in an elaborate confidence trick" (256).

The dilemma is well set out in this impassioned volume, whose well-written essays dovetail their themes, sometimes ingeniously, with Shakespearean drama. The conclusions are diverse and sometimes contradictory, however, and strikingly uneven in objectivity. In a cultural climate already bleak, some essays seem driven by a commitment to be scandalized. Damning Tudor Humanist schools for an obedience to power that imposed on their pupils servility, Daniel Bender asserts that today's scholars "unwittingly reproduce the master-servant dynamic," by which "students lose identity as agents of their own interests" (64, 72). This is deeply unfair to the system that generated Thomas More and Erasmus, and set students writing essays critiquing contemporary foreign policy, or monarchy versus republicanism. It is unfair, also, to the flexible openness of today's college Shakespeare classroom, in which students are free to connect (for instance) Romeo's antics to debate of the death penalty, or racism in The Merchant of Venice to the recent American presidency and neofascism. Noting that elite universities recruit LIHA (Low Income High Achieving) students, and conspicuously promote racial and class diversity, Mara I. Amster records in horror that this helps universities to increase profits, and wealthy students to become "more sensitive and more open-minded" (95). Why impoverished universities and a boorish middle class would be preferable goes unexplained. Fayaz Kabani's response to "skyrocketing costs and changing demographics" (185) recommends—like many a neoliberal think tank—that we "do away with or greatly reduce liberal arts or general education requirements at most four-year institutions," substituting training in "a marketable trade" (186, 200). Sharon O'Dair agrees. Two generations of canonical broadening, demographic inclusiveness, and literary critical promotion of progressive...