etter from President Peter Holland

In October, as the England rugby team was preparing to play France in Paris in the Rugby World Cup semi-final and the whole country seethed with another bout of patriotic fervor, the Royal Shakespeare Company sent out an e-marketing announcement. The sports division of Independent Television, the terrestrial rivals to the BBC, “has called on the RSC to help set the tone for their coverage of the game.” Geoffrey Streatfeild, then in rehearsal to play Henry V for the RSC, would appear in the build-up to the game, “performing extracts from Henry’s iconic speeches delivered on the eve of the battle against the French.” Never mind that the quotation from the play that headed the e-mail was “Cry ‘God for Harry, England and St George!’” for the RSC’s marketing department could hardly be expected to remember that that was not “delivered on the eve of the battle.” What really mattered was that we could all tune in to “watch Geoffrey rallying the troops.” Never mind that the colonial ambitions of Henry’s campaign make many of us more than a little uncomfortable. Here was the England team playing on foreign soil and, if not outnumbered on the pitch, they were underdogs enough to make the parallel irresistible.

Reading the surface of the cultural encoding of Shakespeare in such circumstances is easy. But, as Michael Dobson has reminded us recently, sports fans and Shakespeare fans have a lot in common. And there is no greater collection of Shakespeare fans than the scholars and teachers, graduates and other enthusiasts who make up the Shakespeare Association of America. Like any sports fan quoting minutely detailed—and always, to an outsider, magnificently pointless— statistics about her team’s history, our attention to the equally minute details of Shakespeare is of absolute importance to us. When the RSC nudged its fans in that e-mail that they (or should that be “we”?) can click to read “a blog of the rehearsal process,” it reminded me of nothing so much as a virtual tour of the locker-room and privileged access to a team practice. The similarities between the book exhibit at our annual conference and the marketing of team memorabilia are too obvious to be mentioned.

For one group of outsiders, though, what we know about Shakespeare is not magnificently but troublingly pointless. In “The Vanishing Shakespeare,” a report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued last April, nearly all the English departments in the United States are indicted not only for no longer making Shakespeare a requirement for English majors but also for teaching the wrong things about Shakespeare in our courses when we bother to teach his work at all. The report, available at ACTA’s website (with the sporty URL www.goacta.org), complains of our interest in popular culture and sexuality, in early modern material culture and eco-criticism, in gender and the body, in film and reception. Claiming that “academic trends . . . are allowed to push the traditional study of great literature aside,” ACTA advises trustees and administrators, alumni and donors to intervene to ensure that students are taught “the subjects [they] need to know.” The assumptions underpinning such conservative approaches to our work are tiresomely predictable and, from my perspective, frustratingly and irritatingly reminiscent of the endless whining from the anti-Stratfordians that we have lost the true path— and I hope that ACTA’s wish for intervention in our freedom to teach our courses is as unsuccessful and as unconvincing as the arguments for our conversion to belief in the rival claimants.

We know, of course, that our classes are filled with undergraduates as keen as ever to study Shakespeare and equally excited and responsive to the ways we teach his works. Just as alumni/ae are always a little disappointed that their university is no longer quite how they experienced it, so we can be just as pleased that our discipline (or subject or sub-discipline or whatever Shakespeare studies quite is) has not stayed put, that it has moved on precisely because we have moved it and are moving it on. That is our responsibility as academics: to make the object of our work a moving target, always to be reconceived. But such a report, from a group “dedicated to . . . accountability in higher education,” might quite reasonably serve to remind us of our responsibilities to future generations of academic Shakespeare fans. The SAA has a well- deserved reputation for the welcoming warmth of our conferences, for the ways in which the SAA’s graduate students participating in seminars are respected and encouraged by those further on in their careers, a modeling of academic community and exchange of which we can be justly proud. We make present at such times our collective memory of how stressful it was/is to begin our conference-going and how much intellectual stimulus and satisfaction and how much friendship the SAA has brought us. The annual conference (also to be seen as the annual American Shakespeare pep rally) is, as it were, an important means for established Shakespeare scholars and critics of ensuring that the graduates stay committed to being Shakespeareans and do not turn to support a different team. I shall be wondering at the Graduate Student Breakfast at our next conference which of the graduates there might be writing this letter in, say, thirty years’ time.

But there are times when the annual conference may appear to be almost all that the SAA does. The Trustees are currently exploring new ways to encourage links beyond the “traditional” Anglophone and Western basis for our work. But we are also concerned to plan for our future. I am proud that the SAA’s Trustees have approved the proposal to establish an annual prize for the best dissertation in Shakespeare studies, to be presented at the conference (further details are elsewhere in this bulletin). I am delighted, too, that Leeds Barroll has kindly agreed that we may name the prize after him, that we may honor the SAA’s founder as we honor a graduate student’s achievement, that our beginnings and our future are always to be celebrated together.

The English rugby team beat the French in the semi-final (recapitulating Agincourt) and lost to South Africa in the final (recapitulating the end of empire). The RSC’s production of Henry V opens on the day I write this. Their e-mail is filed away for the next time I teach a class on the play, in order to epitomize the “traditional” confident ways of studying “great literature” against which we might want to set our anxieties. I look forward to reading with my colleagues the first submissions for the Leeds Barroll prize that will show us where Shakespeare studies will move next and what those fans will be cheering for. What else can I say but “Go Shakespeare!”