(Director’s note: Elizabeth Rivlin, teaches in the English department, and her research interests include the history of Shakespeare in American literature and culture, especially cultures of reading; theories of adaptation; and early modern drama and prose. Her current book project is titled Shakespeare and the American Middlebrow, for which she won a NEH Summer Stipend. This is Clemson Humanities Now.)
With the stay-at-home orders that arrived in March came a slew of advice about what to do with all the unexpected, homebound leisure that some Americans found themselves with. Reading seemed to be high on the list, judging by a flurry of media pieces with titles like “The Lockdown List: Books to Read During Quarantine.” While some of the recommendations were for new and contemporary literature, the “classics” and “the great books” also had their cheerleaders. Take, for example, the well-publicized “Tolstoy Together,” a project in which the writer Yiyun Li read and discussed War and Peace, book club-style, with members of the public.
Shakespeare, too, has gotten love during the lockdowns. Patrick Stewart read the Sonnets aloud to us daily on Facebook, and, inspired by a Twitter meme claiming that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in quarantine for the plague, prominent Shakespeare scholars like Stephen Greenblatt, Emma Smith, and James Shapiro meditated on what Shakespeare has to tell us about being creative in or simply living through a pandemic. Others offered direct advice to help readers tackle Shakespeare. Acknowledging that “many people have said they find reading Shakespeare a bit daunting,” Emma Smith returned with “five tips for how to make it simpler and more pleasurable,” her last bit of counsel being “Don’t worry.” Allie Esiri recommended particular readings from Shakespeare for the lockdown period, on the theory that “Reading Shakespeare concentrates the mind which we are all in need of, lending both a challenge and a reward.” Meanwhile, in the conservative publication The Spectator, Chilton Williamson, Jr. guiltily confessed that “it is too easy to put off reading” Shakespeare and pledged to “rectify” that by putting The Complete Works of Shakespeare on his pandemic reading list.
This lockdown-inspired burst of enthusiasm for reading, and in particular for “classics” like Shakespeare, is just the latest manifestation of a persistent current in American life that has linked reading to a quest for self-improvement in which edification and pleasure are supposed ideally to mix. I’m working on a book, Shakespeare and the American Middlebrow: Reading Publics, 1878-Present, that looks closely at institutions that promoted the reading of Shakespeare with just such aims: Chautauqua is a small town in upstate New York that for several decades at the turn of the last century was the center of the burgeoning self-education movement in the United States; The Book-of-the-Month Club pioneered the mail-order sale of books at large scale in the early- to mid-twentieth century; and the Great Books Movement generated a list at mid-century of what it dubbed “the greatest books of the western tradition” and sold them to the American public in 54 volumes. All three of these institutions promised that learning to read books of a certain “quality” or canonical status would create individual mobility and collective uplift, and all three promised to help readers deal with the perceived difficulties and obstacles that accompanied this ambitious reading.
Arguably, no one entity today has the impact on Americans’ reading habits as these institutions did in their heyday (although Oprah’s Book Club has more recently enjoyed something of the same influence). Even on the diffused internet, however, many voices dispense familiar-sounding wisdom, especially the assurance that the reading of culturally sanctioned, esteemed works is therapeutic and even curative in a time of crisis. In this, they hearken back to earlier reading initiatives, for example, the Great Books Program, which in the midst of the Cold War promoted self-educational reading as a means for the American public to rise to the level of an enlightened democratic citizenry and thereby defeat the insidious threat of communism. The dangers may present themselves in different shapes in 2020, but the prescription remains the same.
One thing that does seem to be changing is Americans’ expanding sense of the kind of reading that can enlighten and improve: witness the recent outpouring of #BlackLivesMatter reading lists. When so much seems to fall outside of people’s control, the lure of reading, whether it’s James Baldwin, Shakespeare, or both, is still that the self can be improved, and that if progress is possible on a personal level, perhaps it can also be imagined on a collective scale.