NotHardUp1
What? Me? Really?
Aside from Britain heavily marketing Shakespeare for tourism, American middle and upper classes emphasize it as a marker of class in a society that has little other than money and technology to mark class.
Fashion has long since been reduced to the lowest level, even when expensive.
High school curricula require Shakespeare in the advanced courses, and to a degree that no other author really enjoys. There is an unspoken Anglophilia in American cutlure, that surfaces in not just the persistence of news reporting, but in all sorts of marketing. Pitch men and women often will inexplicably be British with an accent, a holdover of the "snob appeal" device in sales.
It's amazing how long the Brit prejudice has held on, to the detriment of all other cultures coming here, and long after race-based changes were implemented in curricula.
In a nation of mongrels, we often just default to identifying with the English, since our culture speaks almost exclusively that language and cannot read in any other.
