In Shakespeare’s lifetime Pericles was the most popular of his works; in the 19th century, lines from King John and Henry VIII, much neglected today, were the most likely to appear in the quote books and progymnasmata collections so popular then. Emerson bitterly lamented that Harvard, his alma mater, had no lecturer in Shakespearean rhetoric. His lament went unheeded; neither Harvard nor Yale included Shakespeare among their course readings until the 1870s. Yet for 19th century men like Emerson this really was no great loss. The American people of this era were so engrossed with Shakespeare that no one living in America could escape him: evidence of his place in America’s “pop culture in the nineteenth century [can be found in everything from] traveling troupes, Shakespeare speeches as part of vaudeville bills, huge crowds and riots at productions, [to accounts of] audiences shouting lines back at the actors.” I am reminded of Tocqueville’s observation that every settler’s hut in America, no matter how squalid or remote, had a copy of a newspaper, a Bible, and some work of Shakespeare inside it. Tocqueville used this as evidence to buttress his claim that the Americans were more educated and cultivated than any other people on the Earth. He may have been on to something. One cannot read the diaries, letters, and editorials of 19th century America without wondering at their eloquence and erudition. What caused this, if not the many hours they spent as children on their mother’s knee learning to read from the Jacobean English of the King James Bible and the plays of Shakespeare?
Greer goes on to discuss Shakespeare in American Politics:
These allusions to Shakespeare only occupy a small portion of the two men’s debate–no more than a few paragraphs out of ninety or so pages of text. Nevertheless, the use of Macbeth’s script in the debate is telling. Neither Webster nor Haynes thought it was a waste of their time to debate the finer points of Shakespeare’s plays in the halls of the Senate. The reader senses that Webster, in particular, did so in a positively gleeful fashion. it is also worth noting that the play is not just used a source of pithy wisdom or quotable poetry. Webster discusses elements of its plot at length to drive home his meaning.
These speeches were given to a full standing audience. They were later printed and distributed in newspapers and periodicals across the nation. Webster and Haynes assumed, therefore, that the average reader of their words would understand the allusions made. You would be hard pressed to find an equal number of Americans today who would understand all such talk of Banquo’s ghost.
We have, since then, “gone from long discussions of Shakespearean drama on the senate floor to the shallow repetition of disembodied sentence fragments.”
Lexington Green adds that this is no accident:
You left out a conscious decision for the last 60 or so years by the educational establishment to downgrade the curricula of all of our schools, K-12-colllege. An ideological rejection of any literary canon composed of dead, white, European males was a conscious decision, aggressively and relentlessly maintained fro decades. It was and is a policy. Three entire generations of Americans were cut off from their past, their heritage, the glories of their own language, in a conscious and intentional act of cultural warfare.
That is, three generations of White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans.
Three generations of English speakers, and the greatest stories ever told.
And don’t forget the Greek, Roman, and Christian heritage too.