CHAPTER 5 Social Dreaming and Making Shakespeare Matter T hus far I have been at pains to suggest that it is only by attend- ing to the way in which institutions such as the pretertiary school and the latter-day culture industry have served as privileged and even competing sources of dissemination that we can truly begin to locate Shakespeare extramurally, in perimillennial public culture in the United States. Moreover, it has been my contention that we must begin to speak of Shakespeare as public—that is, as a discursive object whose imaginative extensions belie the obsolete modernist division of culture into high and low, and whose material presence far exceeds any straightforward description. It is only in doing so that we can jettison the anachronistic and obfuscating assessment that Shakespeare remains principally the province of elites who, one hundred years ago, sought to ally him with hegemony and a racialized patrimony in the face of new immigration patterns, and whose legacy is presumed to persist virtually uninflected. As this study has tried to sug- gest, the subsequent work of the twentieth century has been to extend the reach of Shakespeare into the secondary school and even farther into the mass-educational apparatus, where familiarity with at least a handful of the plays has fueled a series of formations, from NEA initiatives to documen- tary and film adaptations. Even these cinematic conjurations of Shakespeare seldom escape what I’ve called the pedagogical imperative, however much they define themselves as antidotes to the schoolroom. At the same time, the growing alliance between education and market forces suggests a way in which some, at least, of the Shakespeare films of the 1990s aim to supple- ment, perhaps even rival, the state-sponsored national educational system that gave rise to mass familiarity with Shakespeare in the first place. D. Albanese, Extramural Shakespeare © Denise Albanese 2010