ABSTRACT
The expertise I bring to this article is in ecocriticism rather than Shakespeare or Early Modern literature. That doesn’t quite encompass what I want to say. I was first set a Shakespeare play at school. This was Shakespeare. Reading him would be one’s great discovery of what literature could be. Engaging with these texts, more than any others, would be the making of one’s literary intelligence. This view of Shakespeare was standard when I was an undergraduate; implicit in the way even Marxist and feminist critics frequently chose Shakespeare as their ground of contention. Radical experimental theater groups, too, often chose to realize their ideas by performing him. In seizing him, they were seizing the center, the most prestigious territory—and acknowledging also the extraordinary richness of this territory. When I started my first university job in 1990, all first year students took a Shakespeare course, and all members of the department were expected to teach it. Everyone with any sort of literary expertise had to have something to say about Shakespeare. The position of Shakespeare in the British national school curriculum, in undergraduate courses, and in the wider public culture, continues to reproduce this assumption.
