Don’t bar the bard.

In this time of bipartisan acrimony, many on the left and on the right share one point of consensus: Shakespeare is a problem.

Admittedly, this consensus exists at the ends of the spectrum, and chiefly among the professional prudes and scolds who inhabit those extremities. After a season in which most of the hits Shakespeare took were from the education professionals on the cultural left (he was misogynist, racist, bigoted, colonializing, and Eurocentric), he has been taking some from the right (he was smutty, profane, dallied with homosexuality, and is too hard to read). The most recent sally of this kind was a kerfuffle in Florida over the summer when Hillsborough County teachers decided, or were told, to cut the sexy parts from Shakespeare to avoid falling afoul of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act. Then the Florida Department of Education jumped in and told teachers they can do full Shakespeare—for now.

To be fair, Shakespeare is hanging in there despite the sniping. The Common Core State Standards for English mention him nine times, requiring high-school students to read at least one of his plays. Mocking the pursed-lipped, humorless ideologues at both ends is easy. But I worry that despite programs like the National Endowment for the Arts’ modest Shakespeare in American Communities, we will forget why Shakespeare matters deeply, why he really is a universal author, and why he is worth reading even if he talks about sex, features unpleasant male behaviors, and uses words (a good 25,000 of them, some of which he invented) that we find hard to understand [ . . . ]

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