I love Shakespeare, whose 439^th birthday was yesterday. For the past quarter century, I’ve seen maybe one of his plays year. Since I’ve lived out in the western ‘burbs of Philadelphia, I’ve mostly attended shows from People’s Light & Theatre Company in Malvern, a company whose work I’d heard of even back in the San Francisco Bay Area. My favorite of their productions to date has been one of Coriolanus, a text I’ve always loved but never seen performed before. Not too long ago, I caught a great production of As You Like It put on by The Acting Company to a nearly empty auditorium at Great Valley High School. The largest single contingent in the audience were a group of young adults from a group home for the developmentally disabled, and they left at the intermission.

 

I also think Shakespeare can have a positive influence upon almost any writer’s work. It’s precisely the influx of Shakespeare on Melville’s prose that transforms Moby Dick from his previous merely excellent work. I also think that this is what Olson takes from Melville, both in his critical prose and in his poetry, up to & including the creation of the Falstaffian persona Maximus.

 

So I wonder just a little how come I find it so deeply creepy that Dana Gioia’s big initiative at the National Endowment of the Arts should be a $3 million program to bring Shakespeare to “100 small and midsize American cities in all 50 states?” In fact, The Acting Company, originally founded by John Houseman with Margot Harley when they were at the Julliard School, will be one of the beneficiaries of this program.

 

My problem is this. The NEA, which has very limited funding, is using a substantial chunk of its resources – $3 million from a total of just $116 million – to promote the work of a foreign author. Not any old foreign author, mind you, but one whose values for poetry just  happen to coincide, at least in Mr. Gioia’s mind, with the aesthetic program of new formalism.

 

It would appear that there is no American author or play that could compete with the Bard of Avon for such federally subsidized dissemination. Imagine, if you will, Angels in America in Missoula and Bozeman, Einstein on the Beach in Fresno and Redding, August Wilson, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, Lillian Hellman, Sam Shepherd, Ntozake Shange, maybe a little Def Jam right there in Crawford, Texas. Rattle off your own examples here – almost any would do, even Rent, Chicago or Urinetown.

 

Theater as practiced in the United States is already the most conservative of the literary arts & the one most thoroughly enmeshed in a Eurocentric frame. Now we have the federal arts program placing at the center of its agenda a project intended to reinforce the impression that theater in America extends from the British Isles, rather than, say, Noh theater of Japan, the puppet theaters of Southeast Asia or the performance traditions of any of the world’s other peoples. The ultimate purpose of this project is not to open America up o theater, but rather to concretize the narrowest possible definition of what theater actually might be. At its heart, the Endowment’s endorsement of Shakespeare is a profoundly anti-democratic concept, which will no doubt help to endear it all the more to the likes of Hilton Kramer, Bill Bennett & Mrs. Cheney.

 

Fortunately – and there is some good news here – fortunately, Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Even the worst theatrical bungling can’t completely obliterate those elements that Melville & Olson found in his work, the restless always inventive destroyer of limits, an intellect who would no doubt treat the New Formalists for the Myrmidons they are.