In this time of bipartisan acrimony, many on the left and on the right share one point of consensus: Shakespeare is a problem.

Admittedly, this consensus exists at the ends of the spectrum, and chiefly among the professional prudes and scolds who inhabit those extremities. After a season in which most of the hits Shakespeare took were from the education professionals on the cultural left (he was misogynist, racist, bigoted, colonializing, and Eurocentric), he has been taking some from the right (he was smutty, profane, dallied with homosexuality, and is too hard to read). The most recent sally of this kind was a kerfuffle in Florida over the summer when Hillsborough County teachers decided, or were told, to cut the sexy parts from Shakespeare to avoid falling afoul of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act. Then the Florida Department of Education jumped in and told teachers they can do full Shakespeare—for now.

[Adam Laats: The conservative war on education that failed]

To be fair, Shakespeare is hanging in there despite the sniping. The Common Core State Standards for English mention him nine times, requiring high-school students to read at least one of his plays. Mocking the pursed-lipped, humorless ideologues at both ends is easy. But I worry that despite programs like the National Endowment for the Arts’ modest Shakespeare in American Communities, we will forget why Shakespeare matters deeply, why he really is a universal author, and why he is worth reading even if he talks about sex, features unpleasant male behaviors, and uses words (a good 25,000 of them, some of which he invented) that we find hard to understand.

Shakespeare’s importance used to be universally accepted. W. E. B. Du Bois, a man at odds with much of the culture around him, wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, “I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not.” For Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates on Robben Island, in South Africa, Shakespeare represented freedom and civilization, a source of inspiration and not just an escape from reality. They signed their names next to favorite passages: Mandela affixed his signature to the passage from Julius Caesar, “Cowards die many times before their deaths / The valiant never taste of death but once.”

Teenagers, we can be quite certain, will think about sex and snicker at dirty jokes no matter what, so why not let them read in Romeo and Juliet that “the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon”? After all, many of them will be more like Mercutio than the sulky Romeo. And if some parts of Shakespeare are not merely uncomfortable but offensive, why not confront them? I went to an orthodox Hebrew day school, and we read Merchant of Venice in a spirited English class—and it did not only no harm but some real good. Shylock gets most of the best lines, and his “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech—including its chilling last line, “The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction”—gave us enough to occupy an entire class.

The supposed obscurity of Shakespeare’s language is much less of a problem than people may think. Laura Bates’s remarkable memoir of teaching Shakespeare in an Indiana supermax prison, Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary With the Bard, should convince anyone of that. Many of the prisoners had minimal education and struggled with disabilities and traumas (and bloody crimes), and yet they, too, fell for Shakespeare. They could hear the music, although they did not understand all of the lyrics. For students facing fewer hurdles, having to tackle something big and hard but deeply rewarding, like one of Shakespeare’s plays—in their entirety, mind—is still a worthy challenge. It is a serving of steak in place of the thin gruel offered by timid pedagogues fearful of inquisitors searching for heretics.

The temptation to bowdlerize Shakespeare, or to edit out the icky parts, or to scramble for relevance by dressing him up, is not merely off-putting but utterly unnecessary. I once taught Coriolanus to a group of Johns Hopkins University undergraduates and graduate students. The play deals with a Roman general who is a brilliant and lethal soldier, a compelling if vituperative speaker, and a political dunce. After winning great victories, he is within reach of the final prize: the consulship in Rome. The plebians are willing to grant it to him, but they want one last thing. They want him to strip off his toga and show them his two dozen battle wounds.

Coriolanus explodes in fury: “Better it is to die, better to starve / Than crave the hire which first we do deserve.” Knowing that in my class I had half a dozen veterans of the wars of the first two decades of this century, I asked whether any of them would be willing to share with the rest of us whether they, too, had been asked to, as it were, show their wounds. The result was a revelation for the younger students of the bitterness of those who have seen and done terrible things when the rest of us approach them as voyeurs.

Like most classes, we approached Shakespeare chiefly through the written word, and indeed many great admirers of Shakespeare—Abraham Lincoln seems to have been one—thought him much better read and pondered than seen onstage. For my part, productions of Coriolanus that dress him up in a fascist-looking uniform or a modern camouflage battle dress seem distracting. There was a genius in the bare Shakespearean stage, with only a few props and actors dressed up in aristocratic cast-off clothing. Small wonder those traditional stages have made a comeback.

Of course, the price of immersion in Shakespeare can be reading too much of the contemporary world into him. Donald Trump, for example, is not Richard III, who (as portrayed by Shakespeare, not the historians) was brilliant, clever, and brave as well as a wounded, malignant narcissist and sociopath. Nor is Trump, as intimated by a production of Shakespeare in the Park, a kind of Julius Caesar ripe to be cut down by a Brutus in a blue business suit. He was and is his own uniquely problematic figure. If he resembles any Shakespearean character, it is probably Cloten in Cymbeline, a dangerous prince, a stupid, ambitious, would-be rapist whose courtiers mock him even as they enable his misadventures.

[From the October 1991 issue: The case for Shakespeare]

Shakespeare is of enduring value to us all. He reminds us of the extraordinary beauty and flexibility of the English language, and of rhetoric’s potential to inspire and to deceive. His characters—and he is all about character—are never as simple as they seem, and neither are the real human beings we encounter. The terrors and the joys of life mirror the ones that all of us, to a lesser or greater degree, experience. He takes some effort, but what good thing does not? He can only subvert those whose mind, having been firmly closed from without or within, has a gnawing doubt that something beyond a grovel to orthodoxy of any kind may be out there.

Eliot A. Cohen’s The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall has just been published by Basic Books.