The Shakespeare scholar puncturing pretensions of modern academy

It is Shakespeare who has led Sean Keilen to challenge both the “intellectual pride” and the “social justice activism” that he sees as all too common among literary scholars.

Now professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he has devoted much of his career to studying Shakespeare. He had no problem in describing his basic approach as “conservative, in the specific sense of conserving and transmitting what comes down to us from the past, so it can be a source of creativity for the next generation”.

Indeed, “at a time when virtually no one is reading anything that doesn’t appear in a social media feed”, he really doesn’t know what his profession is for, if not “to increase the number of people who love reading”.

Yet among the countless benefits of reading Shakespeare, Keilen believes, is in puncturing the pretensions of himself and many fellow academics. He sets out the case in Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts (published in the UK on 14 July by Princeton University Press).

The book describes how the “scholars” in Shakespeare’s plays – Hamlet, Prospero in The Tempest and the young noblemen in Love’s Labour’s Lost, who are convinced of their own intellectual superiority and try to live without women – all “travel an arc of moral development, from the aloofness of academic life, reticence to speak publicly and self-created exile towards the society of other minds”, a “trajectory” Keilen has also “followed in [his own] career”.

Reading and teaching Shakespeare, he explained to Times Higher Education, “pierced the thick rind of my own solipsism. The better I got at showing students why the jokes about scholars in Love’s Labour’s Lost are hilarious, the more I came to see myself as the object of their punchlines. It was liberating to be able to laugh at myself after many years of taking myself too seriously.”

Yet the issues raised by Shakespeare’s amused scepticism about scholars went well beyond the personal and reached to the heart of debates about the purposes of education. Today, unfortunately, incentive structures within the academy, argued Keilen, “create a constant pressure for literary scholars to publish contrarian ideas, extreme arguments and specious rhetorical performances”, which meant that they were “always working for our own good rather than the good of literature and our discipline”.

He would prefer that “people in positions like mine should teach more and write less” and that “writing for broad, public audiences should become a normal part of one’s formation as a scholar”, not least because “engaging public audiences is essential for the discipline’s survival”.

As an example, Keilen recalled a programme he had organised at Santa Cruz for local military veterans. This featured a monologue called Cry Havoc! by Stephan Wolfert – an actor and veteran who works with victims of trauma – which explored “his own wartime experiences, difficulties returning to life in society and the way that stumbling on a performance of Shakespeare saved his life”.

The monologue itself, which included “several speeches Shakespeare wrote for his soldier protagonists”, was “extraordinarily moving”. Yet “even more moving”, according to Keilen, was “the presence and response of the veterans who attended it. I don’t believe that they were especially curious about Shakespeare before Stephan performed; I know that historically they have not felt especially welcome on my campus.”

What the programme “showed brilliantly”, he went on, was that “the performance and discussion of Shakespeare’s works can serve as the common ground on which people with different life experiences and political convictions can achieve new understanding and mutual respect”.

Although firmly convinced that “reading and discussing literature with other people can and do lead to surprising transformations of perspective and new ways of living”, Keilen was “sceptical of all attempts to use literature to advance political goals”. While Hamlet famously wants to “set right” a world that is “out of joint”, his book argues, his refusal to “study the past to learn what human nature is and how to live wisely” soon leads him to become “incredulous that anyone could disagree with him” and “oblivious to the impact of his behaviour on those he loves”.

It was probably now impossible not to see The Tempest as a play about colonialism; yet the many scholars who “hop[ed] to demonstrate that our discipline addresses, or even ameliorates, the suffering of oppressed people” tended to neglect its many other central concerns, not least the nature of education.

At one point, Keilen cites the words of one of today’s leading Shakespeare scholars, Gary Taylor, that the discipline of English has “a vested interest in maximizing and glorifying the differences between itself and the general public”, something that led professors to “stress individual intellectual subtleties rather than a community of shared response”. Furthermore, while they tended to “intellectual elitists”, what they forgot was that Shakespeare himself almost certainly was not. Shakespeare’s Scholars draws out the challenging implications of that central claim.