Shakespeare Free Degrees!

[Steelhead]

While forcing my way through Timothy Egan's dolorous piece on the
overdevelopment of the American West, my eye wondered over to another
article in the NY Times (all the lies that fit, as Chomsky sez) about the
current status of Shakespeare on campus--which appears to be more extreme
than the status of the spotted owl in Oregon.

Seems you can now earn a Literature degree at 63 percent of the
Universities and colleges in the US without ever having to read "a sonnet
or play by Shakespeare." Chaucer and Milton have suffered an even worse
fate. Which is certainly fine by me. I always preferred Marlowe the spy and
heretic to Shakespeare the poet of Tudor Power; and William Langland (who
wrote the GR of the 14 century, Piers Plowman) to Chaucer. Milton, though!
Hard to lose a regicide like him.

So it goes.

In the same edition of the Times, a female professor at the University of
Chicago (that bastion of bankers and lawyers) bashed Kenneth Branagh's new
film of Hamlet (four hours long, includes every line, including the
Fortinbras subplot) for being "much too long." Hamlet, she observed, was
overwritten. WS used 12 metaphors when 4 would have done! Never thought
about the play *that* way before. Makes sense, though.

Yes, indeed. Post-modernism rules!

Can I turn in *my* literature degree for the new, Shakespeare free version?

Steely