The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 29.012 Wednesday, 24 January 2018
From: Ward Elliott <
Date: January 19, 2018 at 6:37:08 PM EST
Subject: RE: SHAKSPER: Across Disciplines
Re: Shakespeare Across the Disciplines
There’s a lot of extra-disciplinary attention to Shakespeare out there, both from before and after academic disciplines as we know them became self-conscious, card-carrying, intensified, and enclosed at the end of the 19th century. Two more books from Political Science/Government come to mind: Allan Bloom & Harry Jaffa, Shakespeare’s Politics, 1964, and Bloom, Shakespeare on Love and Friendship, 2000. Many people from outside disciplines like Rob Valenza (math) and me (Government) have rushed in to tackle Shakespeare authorship questions where American English-department pros have long feared to tread. See our “Oxford by the numbers” in the Tennessee Law Review’s Shakespeare authorship symposium 2004, and our “Language, Key to Authorship” in the Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, 2016. Quite a few of the other contributors to both references were not English Department regulars. Let’s not forget E.K. Chambers, a giant among Shakespeare scholars, whose day job was adult education. We outsiders are grateful to have been allowed in the tent, grateful not to have been called out for trespassing, and above all grateful that someone like Hardy took the time and trouble to provide a tent.
Shakespeare lived in an age of rampant, sometimes ruthless agricultural enclosure, was heavily invested in it in Stratford, and must have profited from it, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare, 2001, Kevin Quarmby, “Bardwashing Shakespeare,” 2015. In London he and his associates did his best to enclose and profit from his plays, and perhaps his poems as well. It’s hard to think of a single economist other than Peter Drucker who has taken on Shakespeare, but economists have had more than most to say about the Tragedy of the Commons. They tell us there is a strong relationship between enclosure, ownership, intensity of cultivation, investment, and productivity, and they are right. We wouldn’t have had the plays or the Quartos or the Folios, or civilization itself, if there had been no way for someone to close them off and charge admission. Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: the Origins of Cultures, 1978. We owe many good things to ounces and pounds of disciplinary self-enclosure, but it hardly follows that tons of it would be even better, or that Shakespeare studies should be kept watertight and militantly guarded, as medicine and law are, by appointed gatekeepers and bans on unauthorized practice. There’s no such thing as unauthorized practice of Shakespeare. Shakespeare may have lived on enclosure, but he’s too big a part of the world’ s cultural commons to be enclosed himself. As Leonard Cohen put it, “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.”
Yours,
Ward Elliott
Burnet C. Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions, Emeritus
Claremont McKenna College