It is Shakespeare who has led Sean Keilen to challenge both the “intellectual pride” and the “social justice activism” that he sees as all too common among literary scholars.
Now professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he has devoted much of his career to studying Shakespeare. He had no problem in describing his basic approach as “conservative, in the specific sense of conserving and transmitting what comes down to us from the past, so it can be a source of creativity for the next generation”.
Indeed, “at a time when virtually no one is reading anything that doesn’t appear in a social media feed”, he really doesn’t know what his profession is for, if not “to increase the number of people who love reading”.
Yet among the countless benefits of reading Shakespeare, Keilen believes, is in puncturing the pretensions of himself and many fellow academics. He sets out the case in Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts (published in the UK on 14 July by Princeton University Press).
The book describes how the “scholars” in Shakespeare’s plays – Hamlet, Prospero in The Tempest and the young noblemen in Love’s Labour’s Lost, who are convinced of their own intellectual superiority and try to live without women – all “travel an arc of moral development, from the aloofness of academic life, reticence to speak publicly and self-created exile towards the society of other minds”, a “trajectory” Keilen has also “followed in [his own] career”.
