ABSTRACT
Shakespeare has become a literary institution, seen by many teachers and lecturers as the unquestionable centre of English studies, and a figure familiar to anyone who knows anything about literature. In her book Letters to Alice, on First Reading Jane Austen, the contemporary novelist Fay Weldon (b. 1933) suggests that writers ‘build Houses of Imagination’ in ‘the City of Invention’. This city has an ‘all male suburb of sci-fi’, a ‘Romance alley’ and ‘public buildings and worthy monuments, which
some find boring and others magnificent’. The city is a particularly interesting metaphor for literary value, since, just as in any city, some districts are ‘better’ than others. She writes that at the ‘heart of the city is the great Castle Shakespeare. You see it whichever way you look. It rears its head into the clouds reaching into the celestial sky, dominating everything around.’ Although the huge castle is a ‘rather uneven building, frankly . . . shoddy, and rather carelessly constructed in parts’, Weldon writes that it ‘keeps standing through the centuries and, build as others may, they can never quite achieve the same grandeur; and the visitors keep flocking, and the guides keep training and re-training, finding yet new ways of explaining the old building’. Weldon is showing us the way Shakespeare holds his place at the heart of the canon, while, apparently, other authors try in vain to achieve his stature and literary critics offer new ways of approaching his work.
