SHAKESPEARE IN THE NEWS

NEW YORK--Yo, Shakespeare! American book publishers should lift a draught for you on your upcoming birth- and death day, and vow not to drumble the plays and sonnets but to publish them featly, since the work makes up the greatest backlist of any writer in history.

And such an easy backlist to build. There are no copyrights to worry about, no advances to negotiate, no book parties and tours to plan. No author royalties. Moreover, anyone with a laptop can publish an anthology or any of the plays and sell it off the back of a truck if necessary.

April 23 is the 434th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and the 382nd anniversary of his death. Nearly every large publishing complex in this country has its very own Shakespeare backlist. Last year, to more or less coincide with the birthday, W. W. Norton published a new anthology, The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition. It was a fat 3,420 pages and was priced at $44.95.

Norton estimated that 50,000 to 60,000 people in this country needed or wanted Shakespeare's complete works in an anthology. Since the Norton publication, 460 schools, colleges and universities have adopted this particular anthology, said a spokeswoman for the publisher. And while Norton refuses to give out the number of actual sales, she said that some of the institutions bought 500 copies each.

So to say that Shakespeare still kindles zestful interest is an understatement. For instance, the huge Borders bookstore at 57th Street and Park Avenue has eight shelves devoted to Shakespeare's work and three more of nothing but Shakespeare criticism. And the Brooklyn Academy of Music has its own Shakespeare extravagances throughout the year, including symposiums, movie screenings and plays for schoolchildren in conjunction with the Royal Shakespeare Company's appearance. Shakespeare is also booming on the Internet.

This year, to more or less go hand and hand with the birthday, a new fan club, the Shakespeare Society of America, was founded in New York City by two women, Adirana Mnuchin and Nancy Becker, who had previously been a founder of the now defunct Beethoven Society.

"It's a society for all of us who are not academics but who love Shakespeare," Mrs. Mnuchin said. In short, for amateurs. And since Mrs. Mnuchin has had experience in retailing, she said she hoped that the society would eventually have chapters in Boston, Philadelphia and Atlanta, a sort of Shakespearean softball league.

"There are Shaw and Wilde and Austen societies, but as far as we can find out, ours is the only Shakespeare society in existence" of this kind, she said. There are, of course, academic associations or conferences attached to universities and colleges, but they are for the professionals. The most important of these is the Shakespeare Association of America.

And there is the influential Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, whose director, Dr. Werner Gundersheimer, said he was delighted to learn of the new society, that "the house of Shakespeare has many rooms."

The society can "be a good clearinghouse in New York for Shakespeare stuff there," he said. "Essentially, it's for interested and knowledgeable amateurs, like the Medieval Academy."

Certainly there is something intellectually invigorating in the thought that there is, in Gundersheimer's words, "Shakespeare stuff" floating about New York City. All the society has to do, it would seem, is gather and collect it at its office (45 E. 78th Street in Manhattan) before it is chewed over at one of the programs the organization is planning for its inaugural year.

So far, the new society has 144 members, Mrs. Mnuchin said. And while they all may be hobbyists, the organization does have a heady academic and artistic advisory committee, whose honorary chairman is Harold Bloom of Yale and whose artistic director is Prof. Peter Saccio of Dartmouth. It also has a commitment not to deconstruct Shakespeare but to study him as if he were a contemporary.

What accounts for Shakespeare, the cult figure? Lawrence W. Levine, in his book Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Harvard University Press, 1988), speculated that Americans have always been fascinated by the individual standing alone--the western movie hero, for instance--and by wild and bold characters who master their fate.

Furthermore, Shakespeare may be the first writer to make many women characters at least as complex as men, often a lot more interesting, and just as bold, all of which is thoroughly modern.

Yes, as all his scholars point out, his psychological insights are dazzlingly today. Also, there's often enough blood and guts to satisfy a John Woo movie buff.

Still, Gundersheimer does not underestimate Shakespeare's most obvious and distinguishing appeal, the beauty of his language: "The kids who responded to Romeo and Juliet were not only responding to Leonardo DiCaprio, not just to the beauty of the actor, but also to the beauty of the language," he said. "I'd be interested in knowing whether or not the actor also believes they were responding not only to him but the language as well." He might have pointed out that the movie was made before DiCaprio became a megastar.

Whatever the reason for Shakespeare's popularity in this country, it certainly has been consistent and fantastical, and he didn't even write in American.

Nicholas Moschovakis, who teaches English at the University of the South, ponders the trendiness of Shakespeare. From Baz Luhrmann's "MTV-style" 1996 adaptation of "Romeo and Juliet" to the smattering of out-of-context Shakespearean quotations appearing as sound bites in political speeches, Shakespeare -- once the epitome of high-brow culture -- is being diminished, in some ways, to a low-brow icon. Mr. Moschovakis notes that many well-educated Americans -- including some professors and teachers of Shakespeare -- spend a disproportionate amount of time listening to the buzz and fashionable scholarship concerning the Bard, while rarely reading and thinking about Shakespearean texts, or attending performances of his plays. "It would be easy to call such a situation inevitable, an aspect of our postmodern condition," Mr. Moschovakis writes, yet "the growing fascination of critics with 'Big-Time Shakespeare' ... poses a challenge to widely received notions about the value of art and tradition." Mr. Moschovakis proceeds to contrast the Bard's treatment in America with that in Africa, noting the strong receptivity to and affinity for Shakespeare on the part of African poets, actors, and playwrights. The "allusive practices" of such scholars and performers -- used in America by such writers as Thomas Pynchon and Maya Angelou -- ought to be given more attention, Mr. Moschovakis concludes, for their identification with Shakespearean texts arises "from a meaningful and intentional relationship to Shakespeare's writings (rather than his image) among audiences as well as authors." The journal's World-Wide Web address is http://web-dubois.fas.harvard.edu/transition/