Shakespeare was popular everywhere earlier in our history. His plays toured mining camps, and bound copies stood next to the Bible on bookshelves in frontier homes. The letters of Civil War soldiers, many unlettered beyond three or four years in a rude one-room schoolhouse, were laced with references from Shakespeare's works. Not until the late 20th century would university professors demote him, applying the arcane jargon of literary criticism known as deconstructionism. Instead of recognizing the greatness of his universality, the professors treated him merely as a "cultural construct," specific to his times but not to ours.
In "The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth," bombast becomes the tool to deny that Shakespeare wrote any masterpieces at all. In language that would draw rebuke from a backwoods high-school English teacher, one university "scholar" typically reduces his significance with this barely intelligible gobbledygook: "Veneration of an author has as much to do with his or her potential as a cultural hero who can be appropriated to observe our non-literary needs as with literary 'greatness.'" King Lear is regarded as no more profound than Batman or Robin.
When Paul Cantor, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, attended a World Shakespeare Congress in Tokyo, he was shocked by how many English-speaking scholars from Britain, Canada and the United States had reduced Shakespeare's works to mere examinations of "sexism" and "masculine" points of view. Others obsessed over "power relations," demonstrating how Shakespeare reflects only Western imperialism and literary "colonization." But scholars from countries once behind the Iron Curtain testified to the liberating power of Shakespeare's universal insights. They recalled that Josef Stalin banned the Shostakovich opera, "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," because he didn't want anyone getting ideas from seeing the depiction of a tyrant murdered on stage.
The greatness of Shakespeare lies in his extraordinary language and insight into the human condition, portrayed in complex characters who breathe life into art. Many high school and college students never any longer discover his plays, or learn to appreciate how many of his words have become embedded in the common culture. It's an injustice beyond the jurisdiction even of a Supreme Court.