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In April 2019, in Washington, DC, at the annual Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) meeting, I co-convened with Prof. Jeremy Lopez of the University of Toronto a seminar called “Shakespeare's Enemies.” The seminar invited proposals from scholars who wished to explore the labile properties of Shakespearean animus. We welcomed essays from those interested in cultural history, reception history, pedagogy, literary biography, and changing esthetic appreciations. We hoped that essays might focus on a particular writer's engagement with Shakespeare—say Voltaire's letter to the French Academy or Wittgenstein's reflections in Culture and Value. Others, we thought, might engage with Shakespeare's prevailing and, perhaps, overleveraged cultural predominance. Still others would address Shakespeare's vexed relationship with neoclassicism, his offense to the sensibilities of certain readers across the years, the sometimes ungainly fit of his plays with changing theatrical conditions, and, more recently, academic unease at the predominance of Shakespeare within the English curriculum. Ultimately, we hoped to convene a conversation around what it has meant—at various times and in various places—to hold Shakespeare in distaste or even disdain. After all, from Robert Greene to Wittgenstein, there is a long lineup of “Shakespeare enemies,” and not just the usual suspects—Shaw, Voltaire—but less likely figures, including J. R. R. Tolkien and, more recently, Ira Glass of This American Life who kicked up a minor kerfuffle in 2014 when he tweeted his opinion that “Shakespeare sucks.”
These were not the essays we got, as it turned out. The contributions were a surprisingly idiosyncratic miscellany. A deliberate essay on the Public Theater's 2017 production of Julius Caesar in Central Park and its coverage in the conservative media. A vituperation against the treatment of Shakespeare by filmmakers in the last 25 years. And a searching meditation upon James Baldwin's classic essay “Why