Allan Stratton: Cancel Shakespeare
Allan Stratton: Cancel Shakespeare
If our goal is teaching kids to learn to love reading, we should devote less class time to studying the Bard.
By: Allan Stratton
We’ve cancelled six Dr. Seuss titles. Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird appear to be on the block. But if we’re on a bend to reform our approach to teaching the English language, there are bigger fish to fry. Shakespeare is the curriculum’s Moby Dick. We need a harpoon. More than any other experience, the yearly dissection of Shakespeare turns kids off literature.
I speak as a writer, teacher and lifelong fan. My mom took me to see Twelfth Night when I was five. It was 1956, the last year that the Stratford Festival performed in a tent; Christopher Plummer played Sir Andrew Aguecheek. I went every year after that, my forehead tingling every time I heard the pre-show trumpet fanfare. Before age 12, I’d read and re-read Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807) a million times. And summer jobs variously included Festival usher, dresser and spear carrier.
So no, I’m not saying Shakespeare should be beached in his entirety. But at the moment, as Cassius says in Julius Caesar, “He doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus” taking up a quarter to a third of each year’s high school English course. You’d think no other playwright existed; why, barely another author.
This has serious consequences for what ought to be the primary function of high school study: developing a love of reading that will last a lifetime. This is next to impossible when your major contact with literature is a guy from the 1500s who wrote with a quill in what might as well be a second language. And when your teachers aren’t theatre people who can bring the works from page to stage, for which they were intended and where they shine.
Shakespeare began to be studied in high schools in 1870. The language still required translation, but at least the Victorians were used to long sentences. They were also steeped in the Bible and the Greek and Roman literatures necessary to understand Shakespeare’s allusions. Even in my day, we’d been taught the ancients’ myths.
Today’s students aren’t so much studying Shakespeare as learning to do linguistic and cultural archaeology. Or autopsies. Shakespeare is used for purposes of literary “dissection” and “analysis.” That means spotting metaphors and similes, like those kindergarten puzzle games where you find the bananas hiding in the picture. It’s like pulling the wings off flies to see how they work. Or studying a joke to understand why it’s funny.
Sure, it’s good for students to learn those literary terms and others like iambic pentameter. General knowledge is useful, if you don’t want to look like a dummy; it also helps to connect ideas from disparate sources. But the truth is, terms in a subject area only matter for the people in the field. I drive a car, but damned if I can remember the physics that make it run.
Besides, literature doesn’t exist for its symbols and imagery, nor are they the reason authors write. What’s important is character and story, and the discussions around the meanings that grow out of them. In that respect, Shakespeare is singularly unfit for purpose. There’s too much baggage.
For purposes of analysis, far better to teach one of his sonnets. For instance, Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”, is perfect for demonstrating metaphor, symbol, iambic pentameter and a major, if now rarely used, poetic structure. For those of you with gauzy memories, read those 14 lines and imagine you’re a teenager today. Bright students will be excited, which is terrific. For those who are lost, it’s an hour, not a month, in the dentist’s chair.
That said, although I think Shakespeare’s plays should be curtailed, students shouldn’t totally miss out. Managing a work is something they can be proud of and it gives them a taste of one of the finest writers in the language. But I’d save it for their senior year, when they have more under their belt. And I’d present it as performance rather than text.
I’d start with a film version to get students into the story and characters. After that, they can examine the text of a few major scenes, comparing the page to what they’ve seen. That will teach them how imagination can fill out dialogue, creating performances in their minds. Have them stage a few scenes for fun, living the words on their feet. Saying the words in their own voices will make them less strange. From there, it’s easy to discuss what matters — the people and their choices. That’s an experience they can remember in a good way.
Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth are the best bets. Macbeth has murder, witches, ghosts; it’s short; and it’s a great way to understand gang psychology and how one bad decision can spiral out of control. There’s a terrific 2015 version starring Michael Fassbinder and Marion Cotillard. For fun, show it alongside Men of Respect, a scene-for-scene retelling set in the world of New York’s mafia and starring John Turturro, Rod Steiger, Dennis Farina, Peter Boyle and Stanley Tucci.
R&J is also thematically relevant to teens in a world of multicultural dating. Baz Luhrmann’s thrilling modern-day take stars a young Leonardo DiCaprio and Clair Danes. Franco Zeffirelli’s classic version still holds up, but it’s maybe dated; still, show them the Mercutio/Tybalt duel, the best, most inventive staging of this scene ever. And, of course, West Side Story is a great modern analog: The original Oscar winning adaptation and the upcoming Spielberg version are/will be easily available.
Cutting Shakespeare to size benefits students in other ways. In most school systems, he’s our first and only experience of drama. Is it any wonder that no one outside theatre reads plays? Seeing character names followed by a colon is a trigger warning that the text after the colon is impenetrable. This is bizarre considering the popularity of stories told through dialogue. Graphic novels essentially replace the colon with a speech bubble. And best-selling novels feature long stretches of non-stop conversation to tell their stories.
More important, opening space in the English classroom allows Shakespeare to be seen in the context of other plays and playwrights. This is important for understanding how literary forms change over the ages. And the additional authors enable kids to access a broader range of themes and stories with more immediate application to their lives.
Literature’s two greatest benefits are to help us develop empathy for people unlike ourselves, and to think about the issues we face separate from real life pressures. They’re of special importance in a multicultural world, showing both that themes are universal and that perspectives on those themes are unique to circumstance. Shakespeare’s imagination may be unparalleled, but he doesn’t speak for everyone.
Nor is his the only voice with merit. Older classics about parent/child relationships include Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and David French’s Of the Fields, Lately. But there are also newer works diverse in theme and culture. Check out Fierce (Scirocco, 2020), an anthology edited by Canadian theatre maven Glenda MacFarlane. It includes Judith Thompson’s Who Killed Snow White, about teen sexual abuse uploaded to the Internet; Dave Deveau’s Out in the Open, about a gay kid; Tanisha Taitt’s Admissions, about partner abuse; Michael Kras’ The Team, about bullies; and Ali Joy Richardson’s tragicomedy A Bear Awake in Winter about two traumatized teens about to collide.
Frankly, this fight is stupid. The English canon is so vast that even a university English major will barely read a fraction of it. We should focus on the books most likely to spur kids’ love of the written word. Shakespeare may be our finest writer, but what schools do in his name is a crime.
Allan Stratton is the internationally award-winning author of Chanda’s Secrets and The Dogs.
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I'll begin this comment with what I believe to be true: all competent writers can read well, very few competent readers can write well.
Reading, as critical as it is, is a passive, uncritical skill that's only slightly more mentally demanding than watching a movie, listening to a radio broadcast, or enjoying someone telling jokes. A child's first intellectual challenge using symbols, learning language, is far more demanding than reading. The former has context, the latter doesn't.
What schools should be teaching as the priority is not reading, but writing. Writing at its best--artistic, fiction, or non-fiction--requires trying to affect a reader's thinking about a matter. That takes an understanding of issues and subject matter; control over how to make a sound argument; learning the skill of rhetoric; mastering narrative, etc.
People who can write well have better critical thinking skills than people who only read. A person can't write will without excellent critical thinking skills. Even the most gullible and willfully ignorant, can still read well.
Reading and writing should not be thought of as a 50/50 set of skills. A better teaching ratio of reading to writing would be 10/90.
Teach young people, and even older people, to write well, and reading well follows naturally. So do better thinking skills, knowledge, and wisdom.
The purpose of a high school English language arts class is not to teach kids to love reading, but rather to give them the skills that they need to be effective critical readers and competent communicators. By teaching students these skills, they will learn the value of reading and will learn how to appreciate a wider variety of literature and cultures.
That this article admits that Shakespeare does have a place in classroom (despite the incendiary headline) says volumes about the place of the works of Shakespeare in the English language. To implement a curriculum that speaks to everyone would be impossible and to try would be sheer folly.
Curriculums change and students change too. Finding books that engage people is absolutely an important part of the of the education process. Engaging minds and exposing them to a wide and varied number of viewpoints is important and valuable tool for creating empathy and enabling critical thinking. Living in a multicultural world is to see that much of what we read does not reflect our experiences, English class is the bridge that gives us the ability to understand the ideas of those that are different from our own. Even if Shakespeare’s works are not from our time and do not reflect current experiences, history has shown us that they do have a real ability to speak to something deeper.
If you're trying to solve a crime, you would wise to call your finest detective. If you're trying to teach the art of the English language, you would be wise to call on your finest writer.