I found Martin's defense of Shakespeare underwhelming. First off, more Shakespeare fans need to admit that reading Shakespeare as one's first contact with the plays would be like reading the screenplay to *The Wizard of Oz*. These are plays, not novels, and they need to be experienced as such. Too many high schools view performances of Shakespeare as "cheating" or as a treat for students upon completing their reading. But that's ass-backward, and it's not how Shakespeare himself wanted his plays experienced.

Martin also loses the trees for the forest. Students (and parents) aren't going to be convinced to read Shakespeare because he "invented the human." (And Racine's characters can be as complex and self-aware as Shakespeare's, so let's not get too bogged down in the idea that The Bard invented The Character.) Students who love Shakespeare love the local details: the humor, the wordplay, the powerful emotions, the violence, the sexuality, the tension, the street smarts, the wisdom, of the individual plays. (Why high schools teach the tragedies and not the comedies is beyond me. Then again, Americans always think violence is more serious than sex.)

This is why "The Canon" is a meaningless term to me. As a scholar, I find it reductive. To really know Shakespeare, you must read far outside The Canon. As a reader, it is a meaningless generalization. Seeking pleasure from texts, I know no canon. I know only delightful, challenging plays, poems, novels, essays, stories, articles, comics, films, television shows, and so on. So I'll defend much of what's canonical, but I don't feel too strongly about the idea of The Canon as an entity. It takes away too much from our firsthand experience with great art.

True understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of Shakespeare's works require concentrated study, not mere attention to the flashier tableaux and starker language in performances of his plays, as his fellow actors and sponsors of the First Folio (1623), Heminges and Condell suggested in their address "To the Great Variety of Readers": "Read him, therefore, and again, and if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him."

If the cultural formation of students and faculty--that is, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic cultivation--is still an important mission of our English and humanities departments, then study of Shakespeare's works should never be diminished through indifference, neglect, or politically-motivated preemption. For proper study of these works is as necessary a propaedeutical to understanding as understanding is to appreciation and enjoyment. Trouble is in convincing many delinquent "post-humans" in trendily-wayward departments of English of this.

Erin: Read your incisive anatomy of Fish's unconvincing "defense" of the humanities as simple pleasure. It's a sad example of the decline of humanities teaching and scholarship, when one considers Fish's long and lucrative career (though I never found his scholarly or critical works particularly impressive or useful), that "he's jes' funnin'" all the time.

Mr. DeLater, you too beg the question in your response above. The question Fish attempted to answer is: "Why support the university study of the humanities?" You assert that studying Shakespeare is part of a moral, intellectual, and aesthetic education, but you offer no evidence that there's any value, any reason to support, such a moral, intellectual, or aesthetic education. The sciences and pre-professional departments of universities have simple, utilitarian defenses of themselves; what, Fish asks, is the worth of a humanities education.

Fish already dealt with the idea of a moral education. Shakespeare's best readers, from Samuel Johnson to Harold Bloom, have never been particularly moral people. We have no evidence that cultured people are better people.

Then we might ask how the ability to analyze Shakespeare makes one intellectual in a way that makes it worth studying. That is to say, we should include the ability to analyze literary texts as part of being "intellectual," but we must still defend the worth of being such an intellectual. Calling literary analysis a prerequisite for intellectual status doesn't elevate intellectual status to a good. Some intellectual pursuits are defended in terms of the value of their products: medicines, computer software, etc. The philosophical problem of deriving an "ought" from an "is" remains. The same holds true for an aesthetic education.

Fish certainly agrees that the analysis of literature is part of an intellectual or aesthetic pursuit. But that's not the issue he engages. Instead, he's treating the issue of worth or value.

Again, I say it's easy to attack Fish, but most of his critics have yet to supply a better justification of the *value* of aesthetic or intellectual training than the delight it brings to the student of aesthetic or intellectual matters. (I personally think the entire question of "value" in this conversation is misguided from a philosophically minimalist perspective.) But neither DeLater nor O'Connor has articulated a defense of the *worth* of studying history, literature, philosophy, art history, music history, etc.

LB, just time for a few general comments:

I should have thought that facilitating knowledge of self (moral education in a broad sense), of subject (intellectual training), and of what is cultivated appreciation of the arts were the proper ends of humanities teaching rather than unqualified "pleasure" (which can be experienced in many more and much more immediate ways than through humanities study). And if facilitating knowledge as an end also enables us to attain our natural freedom to choose rightly, rationally, creatively, and (we hope) wisely, then it seems that we cannot but value knowledge as a good worth pursuing. The sciences (natural, mathematical, physical, and social) share this end with the humanities. (A good friend of mine who teaches mathematics at university takes great exception to praising his discipline for its mere utility.)

I'm not sure what to make of your assertion about Samuel Johnson's morality (or Harold Bloom's for that matter, though I can't much count Bloom as a particularly illuminating Shakespeare critic), though of course I'd agree that knowing more is no simple formula for acting better. Yet vicarious participation, for example, in complex human dilemmas dramatically, aesthetically, and concretely presented to us in great literary works like Shakespeare's can allow us some penetrating insights into our shared human condition (as well as its flawed nature) and thus greater freedom to alter and amend it. Other arts and sciences reveal to us what is profound, enduring, and sublime in the human creative spirit as well as, by implied comparison, what is merely superficial, ephemeral, and fashionable.

I am Will Shakespeare's greatest living fan. Thank you for echoing what I tell my high school students and fellow teachers--Shakespeare's plays are to be experienced fully by viewing rather than reading the script. We act, view and read a variety of his work in my regular as well as honors classes.

Students are, however, dumbfounded when I attempt to explain the canon to them. It just does not make sense to them to distill a world of written literature to one short list. I like to crack it open and sprinkle sprinkle some contemporary world literature in with the "dead white guys." My students look at literature as a means of communicating a message, especially in our technology driven society. Theyn do not value art for art's sake as previous generations did.