Only two years ago, a report that two-thirds of leading American universities had dropped the Shakespeare requirement for English majors in favor of courses on popular culture and gender studies prompted worries that the playwright — regarded by many left-wing ideologues as the quintessential Dead White Male — was becoming a has-been, a victim of the commissars of political correctness and willfully watered-down curriculums. Today, happily, it’s clear that such reports of Shakespeare’s demise were vastly exaggerated. Shakespeare is still the most produced playwright in 1990’s America, and in England he was recently voted in one BBC poll " the Briton of the Millennium. " There are replicas of the Globe Theater in London and Tokyo, and in Germany his birthday prompts an annual celebration. As the scholar Jonathan Bate("The Genius of Shakespeare")points out, the Bard has become "a world genius" with a "cross-cultural appeal" that defies both the debunking of academic radicals and the stuffy canonization of traditionalists. "Shakespeare in Love" — a witty new movie that works an improvisation on the playwright’s life — was nominated for 13 Academy Awards and shares a nomination for best picture with " Elizabeth," another film(with seven nominations)set against the backdrop of Elizabethan England. These pictures are only the tip of the Shakespeare iceberg. Coming soon are a slew of movies based on his plays, including Julie Taymor’s version of "Titus Andronicus"(with Anthony Hopkins, Alan Cumming and Jessica Lange)and a film adaptation of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream, " starring Calista Flockhart, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline. Alicia Silverstone will soon star in Kenneth Branagh’s new musical adaptation of "Love’s Labour’s Lost," while Ethan Hawke will tackle a "Hamlet" set in the corporate world of the 90’s. Certainly the fact that Shakespeare is a brand name, one who neither demands royalties nor contests rewrites, has something to do with his current revival. Yet at the same time there is a latent power to his work that has allowed successive generations of directors, critics and actors to reinvent him continually in their own image and to find new ways(some profound, some forced, some obviously silly)of pointing up his relevance. Restoration critics emphasized his role as a dramatic playwright who addressed public and political issues. Romantics portrayed him, romantically, as the poet of melancholy and love. And modernists have stressed the difficulty of his work, its layered, contradictory meanings.American universities had dropped the Shakespeare requirement for English majors because the playwright was regarded as______.