English Class, Second Session: Shakespeare is Boring?
It’s been a while since there was an English Class. Sorry about that. I’ve been distracted, and I’ve also been thinking of which class should come next. I have three ideas that I want to get out, so please hold me to them. I want to talk about Shakespeare, satire, and rhetoric. Hold me to those three subjects, or at least to the two that I’m not going to cover today.

Today’s English Class rant is on the elephant in the room of every English department everywhere. I refer, of course, to The Bard of Avon, the Playwright of Playwrights, Willie the Shake himself! A big round of applause for Mr. William Shakespeare!

And the crowd goes silent.

You can feel the Respect oozing out of every corner of the room when a High School English Teacher whips out the Shakespeare. This is it. This is the Big One. This is Poetry and Meaning and Wisdom and Drama all in one slim volume. Students will read the plays and analyze them, and tease out hidden meanings and get all over the structure and symbolism like maggots on a corpse. If they’re lucky, if the teacher is unusually progressive, they’ll read the play out loud in class.

They’ll miss the point entirely, of course. This sort of thing isn’t the students’ fault. Most people don’t learn until college that Shakespeare was popular entertainment right up until the tail end of the nineteenth century, when he got swept up in the creation of a hierarchy of Culture that put him out of the reach of all but the Elites.

Shakespeare really isn’t as hard as most English teachers make him out to be. His stories are lively and entertaining, sometimes even a little trashy (Titus Andronicus, we are looking at you here), full of spectacle and pageantry and living, passionate people. There’s blood, thunder, romance, swordfights, magic, intrigue, sex, and a guy who gets chased offstage by a bear. The language is beautiful, but it really doesn’t need to be translated into the ground. Teenagers can perform Shakespeare, and perform it beautifully. In fact, the youth theater in my home town did Shakespeare regularly, because it was sometimes easier to teach teenagers to perform Shakespeare than to do more modern plays.*

So, with all that accessibility going for it, what happens? Why are people so afraid of Shakespeare?

I think a lot of it is the hype. We’ve made Shakespeare into such a cultural icon that we don’t allow ourselves to get close to his characters, except in the most formalized of ways. We shake their hands rather than embrace them and take them out for pizza and drinks. They’re not allowed to have flaws, unless the flaws are Tragic Flaws. And I think this idolization leads us to miss the point of a lot of the plays.

In my school, you met Shakespeare in ninth grade, freshman year, through two plays, Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice. There’s the first problem. It’s not that these aren’t good plays – they’re both crowd-pleasers, justifiably popular for centuries. I enjoy engaging with them both, albeit for different reasons. But I think that, as an introduction to Shakespeare, you could not pick a worse pair of plays.

The problem is that they’re introduced as representatives of types, of Tragedy and Comedy respectively. I blame Franco Zeffirelli for the first half of this – before 1968, students got Hamlet or Julius Caesar as their first, and therefore model, Tragedy. But then Zeffirelli made his wonderful, drippingly gorgeous movie, and English teachers were suddenly all over Romeo and Juliet. You can see why. Zeffirelli reminded everyone that this was a play about teenagers, and English teachers love to appeal to their students’ teenage egos by having them read books about characters who are also teenagers. Which is fine, except that Romeo and Juliet isn’t quite a Tragedy. Romeo and Juliet is something else entirely, something even more horrible.

It’s a Comedy gone terribly, terribly wrong. The characters, each and every single one, are stock types from Elizabethan comedy. The setup is that of a romantic comedy such as you might find Orlando Bloom and Katie Holmes starring in today. It makes you laugh, it makes you sigh, you can see exactly where the plot is going – and then it doesn’t. The Comic Sidekick dies, horribly, and then everything falls apart, slowly, and no one seems to know how to stop it, and at the end, six people are dead, and the comedy ends in death. It’s horrible.

But it’s only horrible if you know what a comedy is supposed to be. If Romeo and Juliet is your first Shakespeare, you don’t know. And you miss the point. Later on, you read The Merchant of Venice, which is supposed to be a Comedy. Like Romeo and Juliet, it has the bare bones of that form, but it really isn’t. It should leave a bad taste in your mouth even with the happy ending. And I fear that, for many people, it doesn’t. They look at the romances, at the friendship and love between Antonio, Bassanio, and Portia, at the romantic ending at Belmont with all the marriages, and they sigh happily. It’s a Comedy.

Except that it isn’t. Again, it’s Shakespeare taking stock characters and . . . tweaking them. The lovers? They’re fine when they’re with each other, but in the wider world, you realize that they’re not actually very nice people. Antonio is cruel and arrogant, Bassanio is a user, and Portia is downright duplicitous. Gratiano is as biting as Mercutio, but he doesn’t have Mercutio’s warmth and friendliness. These are not at all honorable people. Shylock could have been a stock Villain Jew, except that Shakespeare turns him into a person. Yes, he hates Christians. But, as Shakespeare takes valuable time to demonstrate, he has good reason. Antonio and Bassanio spit at him, curse him, are representatives of a society that imprisons him, forces him into a profession that they despise and then despise him for performing his job – and then they have the gall to ask him for money. With no clear guarantee of paying him back.

Of course, Shylock goes overboard in asking for a pound of flesh as collateral, but the smackdown he gets from Portia is way out of line, especially after her little speech about how the quality of mercy is not strained. Right after she says that, she goes on to show him no mercy whatsoever, including forcing him to convert to Christianity. A happy ending for Shakespeare’s time, perhaps. Or was it? Might this have been the first time that Shakespeare’s audience saw a stage Jew who was a real person, who mourned for his lost daughter, who chatted with a friend, who maintained his humanity in spite of the insults thrown at him on a daily basis? After all that, can you really cheer for Shylock’s humiliation? Can you really love Portia for humiliating him? Can you really applaud Bassanio for choosing a woman who would do something like that? If The Merchant of Venice doesn’t leave you feeling uncomfortable, then you’ve missed the point.

But you only miss the point of these plays if you know what a Tragedy and a Comedy ought to look like. You can’t break rules well without knowing them. If you want students to understand what Shakespeare can be, give them real tragedies and comedies first. Let them understand Hamlet or Julius Caesar or King Lear to find out what makes a tragedy tick. They’re not dumb, and they’ll figure out how Elizabethan tragedy works. Those are great plays, and the magic of the playwright writing for finicky audiences is that they’re engaging. Students will get it. Teachers should not fear for that. There are wonderful comedies – almost no one dislikes A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is not only a Comedy, it’s still actually funny today. Twelfth Night and All’s Well That Ends Well would also serve. They’ve got all the devices and character types.

Once you’ve dipped your toe into the strict genre plays, then you read the ones that twist the genre, and you’ll see what makes them truly special. It’s English class, but you need to teach theater here, not Literature. There is a certain type of purist who maintains that Shakespeare should never be performed, only read. I cry bullshit. They’re plays. They were meant to be performed. They were meant to have an audience, to play to the rafters, to engage hearts, to make people laugh, or cry, or see themselves. A script is only half a play. Even Shakespeare’s scripts. Let yourself get inside Shakespeare. Treat him as you would treat Tony Kushner or Stephen Sondheim or Wendy Kesselman. For that matter, treat Shakespeare as you would treat a movie – look for the formula, look at the crispness of the writing, see where it pleases the crowd, and see where it uses the crowd’s pleasure to soar.

Shakespeare is classic, and deservedly so. He should be taught in a way that reminds people of just why he’s a classic, not closed in the tomb of that status.







*Also, Shakespeare is public domain.