I like to think I’m a pretty fair Bardolater, as these things go, but Ryan Cole has seriously overshot, here:

A new study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) reveals, depressingly, that only four of the nation’s top colleges and universities require a Shakespeare course, even for English majors. ACTA, a non-profit based in Washington, D.C., that encourages college trustees to act on behalf of academic freedom and excellence, surveyed U.S. News and World Report’s top 25 national universities and top 25 liberal-arts colleges. Of the former, only Harvard (the lone Ivy League institution to make the cut) and the University of California–Los Angeles require English majors to study Shakespeare. Of the latter, only Wellesley College and the United States Naval Academy do.

(source: English Majors sans Shakespeare | National Review Online)

Now, if this showed that students were making it all the way through K-12 and a 4-year college degree without ever reading Shakespeare, I’d be pretty concerned–like I am seriously upset that my students enter my college lit courses unfamiliar with even the names, dates, and most major works of writers like Donne, Milton, or Wordsworth.  It’s hard to enforce on their understanding how important Charlotte Smith is when they don’t even know how big the influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge proved to be!

Simply put, however, Shakespeare is still a go-to in lit courses.  I’m not saying his works are always taught well, but at least a solid plurality of my students at OSU have read one or more of his plays in high school.  Sure, their selections are stereotyped:  Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar are overrepresented, Hamlet about par, and they’re often sadly unaware of the tragicomedies like The Tempest or the better history plays like the Henry IV and Henry V series.  And in our college Intro to Lit courses, it’s typical to teach at least one Shakespeare play (and those who don’t are generally replacing it with an extra novel).

So count me sorry that the Bard isn’t getting more press, but I’m not going to be upset that more people don’t take a whole single-author course in Shakespeare.

I just wish it meant more students were reading Spenser, or Chaucer, or translating Alfred the Great….

…well, anyway, did you notice that I didn’t mention the comedies above?  Here’s a good take on them:

[some vulgarity in the humor, here]