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Cultural literacy arguments aside, and hopefully not covering old ground . . .
One of my semesters-from-hell in college featured an early Shakespeare class where we studied maybe four plays all term, with the professor parsing lines and walking us through multiple ways each play could be read. Same semester I had a vicious French grammar course with the same in-depth approach. Within a few weeks I hated both classes.
Then, about halfway through the semester, both courses clicked, as if someone had thrown an electric switch in my head. All the odd (to an American brain) French verb tenses, and the equally odd (to a 20th Century brain) words and turns of phrase in Shakespeare dovetailed. I could see traces of the French tenses and sentence construction in the plays, and could hear echoes of Shakespeare’s English in written and spoken French. Both classes made sense and, literally overnight, became my two favorites.
I was absolutely amazed to see so clearly how English had developed – from French to Shakespearean English, and from Shakespearean to modern English – simply from having those two courses together, taught by two hard-assed professors. That insight into how my native language works at the noun-verb-object and idiomatic levels was one of the greatest lessons of my college career. And one I still draw on today.
Yeah, Shakespeare can be difficult. But those old plays have a TON to offer – often in ways neither the student nor the teacher envisioned – if you take the time to really read them.
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