My first encounter with Shakespeare — ‘‘As You Like It,’’ in Miss Gillespie’s eighth-grade English class — left me cold. I still remember the words ‘‘I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry,’’ which I must have been compelled to recite out loud, with a shudder. But not long afterward, I fell in love with him, not through the charm of performance but through the hallucinatory power of his language.

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, /

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, /

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, /

Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you /

From seasons such as these?

It seemed — it still seems — incredible to me that this power and the moral intelligence that it conveyed could come into my possession. If I desired it, it was mine as if by birthright, for the simple reason that English was my native tongue. All that I needed to do was to immerse myself in it passionately. And, equally incredible, as a teacher, I could spend my life sharing this passion with my students.

It is easy enough at the moment to bewail the fate of the humanities. Enrollments in traditional majors like English, history, philosophy and art history are all down from their historic highs and, despite ample evidence to the contrary, students drawn to these fields often fear that they are risking their chances for gainful employment. Left to their own devices, many students avoid serious engagement with the literature, art and thought of the past; ‘‘the past’’ sometimes seeming to them anything earlier than late last night. Anxious to shore up declining enrollments, professors foolishly reinforce this avoidance by jettisoning the requirements that used to compel students to venture into unfamiliar or difficult territory. On those occasions when they do finally enter such territory, they often feel at a loss.