ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the semi-sacred status of William Shakespeare's texts as a matter of public or civic health. Anxiety about Shakespeare disappearing from the public circulation ran high in the 1980s and 1990s, as the campus culture wars in the United States and the United Kingdom debated the value and purpose of Shakespeare on the national syllabus. The anxiety peaked in the United States somewhere in the mid-1990s, when the National Alumni Forum (NAF) published a report exposing the turn of college curricula away from the Great Authors toward courses covering such trivial material as social conditions, sexual topics, and non-literary documents. Cultural Materialism and New Historicism so successfully took up the problem of criticism effacing itself that academics have begun to push back against the futility to which awareness of our own textuality and historicity can lead.
