Sherry Chandler

The Bard Save Us

I missed the Bard’s birthday on April 23 and that is unfortunate because Shakespeare’s stock is very high in the current government. For example, Republican/businessman/poet Dana Gioia, who has resuscitated the National Endowment for the Arts, is big on Shakespeare as cultural prophylaxis. His major initiative as chairman has been Shakespeare in American Communities. From the NEA website:

Shakespeare in American Communities is the largest tour of Shakespeare in American history. The initiative launched in September 2003 with a nationwide tour of seven professional theater companies, including a tour to 13 military bases. A new phase, Shakespeare for a New Generation, began with the 2004-05 school year and provides professional Shakespeare performances and educational programs by 21 theater companies to high school and middle school students. Shakespeare for a New Generation will continue into the 2005-06 school year with approximately 40 additional grants to theater companies.

The official webpage seems to turn Shakespeare into an American patriot, the flag being much more prominant than the Bard. But I digress.

Laura Bush is co-chair of this initiative so perhaps it is not surprising that she should combine Shakespeare with her own second-term initiative, “Helping America’s Youth.” This three-year, $150-million initiative is a sort of “just say no” to the ghetto campaign. As BagnewsNotes explains, “According to the first lady, the program reinforces will power through lectures, role modeling and coaching.” Will power, apparently, is the ghetto youth’s “Passport to Manhood.” And that brings to that other Will power, the Bard. As Laura told Leno, according to Agence France Presse, April 27:

Laura Bush, the wife of the US president, wants to take arms against a sea of illiteracy by enticing gangland boys with the works of William Shakespeare.

Bush, a former librarian who is now a strong literacy activist, lauded taking characters such as Lady MacBeth from Stratford-on-Avon to Los Angeles barrios during an interview with US talk show host Jay Leno late Wednesday.

And as Wonkette noted, she said it without any hint of irony.

But Gioia’s redemption of the NEA defies irony. He (and I assume his ally Mrs. Bush) has been highly successful in taking the NEA out of the center of the culture wars and increasing its funding, as reflected in the 2003 report from Poets & Writers:

Gioia’s goal to establish the NEA as an arts institution serving all Americans seems to resonate with Congress, as the organization’s budget is now slowly but steadily increasing. The 2003 budget is $115.7 million (up from $115.2 million in 2002), and President Bush has requested that Congress allot $117.5 million to the organization in 2004.

To put some perspective on all these figures, the budget passed this week by the Congress gives a tax cut of over $100 billion to America’s wealthy and cuts Medicaid by $10 billion. Then, too, Ron Silliman has some doubts whether Shakespeare is as culturally neutral as the right may assume. He points out that the two American writers most directly influenced by Shakespeare are Herman Melville, especially in Moby Dick, and Charles Olson, neither of whom was exactly a member of what Silliman likes to call the “School of Quietude:”

So the idea of all these people reading, seeing, hearing Shakespeare is, I suspect, much more of a wild card than the NEA’s leaders may comprehend. Because where it won’t lead is back to is either the homogenous retro-utopia of so many a Congressman’s dream nor to the same ol’ stuff the School of Quietude has been shoveling. Inseminating Shakespeare into the American literary landscape is far more apt to generate a bunch of wild men & wyrd sisters instead.

“Fair is foul,” say the Wyrd Sisters, “and foul is fair…”

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