Julie Schumacher’s “The Shakespeare Requirement”

August 20, 2018 – The New Republic

The New Campus Novel

Julie Schumacher’s “The Shakespeare Requirement” is a playful, sharp satire of the horrors of modern academia.

By JOSEPHINE LIVINGSTONE

“The Shakespeare Requirement takes on a department in a terrible state. English at Payne is not so much an intellectual nest of idiot vipers, as in The History Man, but rather a collection of people with very little energy left to give, trying in their semi-competent way to keep their subject alive in a hostile culture. Fitger is perhaps the least competent among them—he can barely use email, for example—but the travails of the novel end up testing his worth as a human being, not as an administrator.”