Reviewers, cultural theorists and my colleagues in Renaissance studies tell me we're in the middle of a Shakespeare boom. That sounds like a housing boom -- something that will eventually go bust. But Shakespeare studies and productions aren't the sort of things that have to go down because they're up. And Shakespeare is indeed up these days.

According to Cornell Professor Walter Cohen, who teaches courses like Shakespeare in the 20th Century and is an editor of the prestigious "Norton Shakespeare," the number, variety and quality of editions available for purchase is unprecedented, suggesting that far more people are buying works of Shakespeare than ever before. Theatrical and film productions and adaptations abound. Despite hundreds of years of interpretation, scholarship keeps revealing more, using a wealth of historical documents and contexts and illuminating new theoretical approaches. And perhaps most obviously, Shakespeare is up in the number of classes offered and students in them.

I know that Shakespeare classes are flourishing in English departments of our peer institutions because I'm in touch with many of these departments. And of course as chair of the English department at Cornell, I know that Shakespeare classes are flourishing here. To consider only courses wholly devoted to Shakespeare offered this academic year, we have 14 undergraduate classes, including nine freshman seminars. I'm not even counting those many classes in which Shakespearean texts figure prominently among other texts of the period.

But are there more offerings and kinds of offerings now than in the venerable past of this department? I sent our undergraduate research assistant, Camden Jenkins, off to look through old Cornell course catalogs. He checked two three-year periods when a larger percentage of undergraduates were English majors than ever before or since: 1960-63 and 1970-73.

In the 1960-63 period the English department routinely offered four courses on Shakespeare per year and these only at the junior, senior and graduate levels. In the 1970-73 period, there were five courses per year, two at the sophomore level and the rest for majors and graduate students. Our understanding that freshmen can -- and want to -- study Shakespeare is of fairly recent date. Our current freshman seminars regularly draw a broad cross-section of the undergraduate student body, attracting students who may well not major in English but who are nevertheless enthusiastic about studying Shakespeare's works.

Shakespeare not just for English majors? Not even just for students in the College of Arts and Sciences? My colleagues who teach popular sophomore-level lecture-discussion classes note that students come to Cornell already looking forward to reading Shakespeare plays and nondramatic poems and viewing Shakespeare productions on stage or in films. They have been prepared not only by their high school reading but also by quotations and images that saturate popular as well as high culture, showing up on tote bags and coffee cups, in major films and even on the cover of a 1996 Newsweek, where Shakespeare was named "Dead White Male of the Year."

One of my colleagues has suggested that, in fact, Shakespeare is "a little bit too 'familiar,'" citing the many pundits who quote lines ludicrously out of context. But he adds that when students actually read and view the plays, Shakespearean characters surprise and shock as much as they did in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Certainly Shakespeare is for viewing as well as reading. All the Renaissance faculty stress the importance for their teaching of Cornell's extraordinary library resources (including the huge Theatre in Video database) and live productions. Another of my colleagues urges her students "to bring their experiences as an audience to the study of texts that were originally written for the stage," and points to the regular productions at the Schwartz Center or at Risley Theater -- at least one Shakespeare play, and usually more, on campus every year. Another colleague notes that productions help students realize that in the plays "thought is active, staged, performed."

Given all this activity and excitement in the Cornell English department around Shakespeare studies, I was a little puzzled when during the last reunion an alumna asked me why the department "didn't still require a Shakespeare class for the major."

Still? I sent Camden to the old catalogs to look at English course requirements. He read back to 1940. At least since 1940 Cornell's English department has never required a Shakespeare class for the major.

Why required? I brooded more over that idea. The idea of requiring a Shakespeare course sounded a bit like requiring a spoonful of cod liver oil. It tastes terrible, but it will do you good.

Shakespeare apparently tastes terrific. The truth is that Shakespeare classes are more like pizza. We don't require students to eat pizza, but they do. They really, really like it.

Professor Molly Hite is chair of the Department of English at Cornell.