The Shakespeare Requirement is a clever clever book that I had trouble getting into at first. Although I enjoyed the numerous puns on the name of the university that provides the setting (Payne: "Celebrating 100 years of Payne," etc.), I found no character I could sympathize with (including all of the English department professors and secretary), except for Angela, a freshman who had previously been home-schooled by a very religious mother.Jason Fitger is the newly established chair of the English department, which is in the lower portion of a building that is truly awful: rodent-infested, desks propped up on blocks, not well heated and not air conditioned, spotty electrical service, etc. Fitger finds he has no budget because the previous chair had never submitted a Statement of Vision (SOV), and because the SOV is now late, it is required to have unanimous department approval. When Fitger assembles his team to vote on a proposed SOV that had been put together the previous year, the Shakespeare professor, Dennis Cassovan, objects. It turns out the SOV, put together while Cassovan was on sabatical the previous year, removes the requirement for English majors to study Shakespeare for one semester. This is unacceptable! Fitger can't get any agreement with his staff to amend the Statement of Vision because (1) they all have their own gripes about their working conditions (why should they approve something Cassovan wants) and (2) they just don't like each other. Meanwhile, the chairman of Economics, Roland Gladwell, whose department is upstairs in the same building, is enjoying his newly remodeled (and air-conditioned) surroundings, courtesy of outside benefactors, and is looking to expand his territory.
After I decided to go with the flow and just enjoy the academic-political intrigues and relationship foibles all around, it turns out that the characters and the plot started to develop more and more, culminating in a truly satisfying ending.
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