Should high school students have to read Shakespeare?

[Prestidigitweeze]

A bit of perspective:

I'm the son of a high school music and English teacher. My mother was kind in most ways, but the classics were another matter. She drove her children insane by quoting Shakespeare constantly.

If I burned my scrambled eggs, then something was rotten in Denmark. If I stayed up all night studying, then yon Cassius had a lean and hungry look. At Passover, when the family lined up for borscht, she and her sisters would perform the three witches scene from Macbeth as my cousins and I quietly gave up on humanity.

You might think these experiences would be enough to drive me away from Shakespeare. Instead, they initiated a dialogue with "the Bard" that has lasted throughout my life -- lasted despite my mother's use of phrases like "the Bard."

Shakespeare's writing is too felicitous, too metaphysical, too expressive to be locked away by my personal embarrassment. It is poetic as well as dramatic; it is an exercise in what Keats called negative capability: the seemingly magical ability of a writer to stand outside the self and inhabit the thinking of everything and everyone around them. Shakespeare had the knack: His tramps and beggars expressed their likely thoughts and impulses in sophisticated language, and that language, even when caricatured and marked by deliberate misuse, is full of complex insights, nuances that would be lost on someone who simply watched the play once.

Shakespeare needs to be read as well as seen. Even the annotations need to be read.

To those who argue that Shakespeare shouldn't be read at all because he is a playwright and is therefore meant only to be seen:

By that logic, virtually all plays are meant only to be seen, and that is an absurdly limiting distinction between drama and literature. Better to say that one doesn't like reading Shakespeare than make such a dishonest argument.

It is the equivalent of saying that composition students shouldn't study scores because classical music is meant to be heard, or that architects shouldn't study drawings. And you can't argue that these are specialized fields and then apply the same argument to literature and writing 101. Everyone must learn to read and write. Everyone must try to master the ability to express themselves formally.

It's important for a young person to learn to understand different styles and levels of English. Sometimes boredom is a disease that can lead to stubborn ignorance. Mediocrity needs to be worked through.

We tend to think that culture = progress but, very often, the opposite proves true. This is illustrated by great writing which employs archaic usage, syntax and diction. Just because it isn't written for this moment in history doesn't mean it is untimely. Archaic work is not merely tedious or worthless because the student has not learned to understand it. We work to understand such writing because it teaches us what language is and is capable of.

Make no mistake: Shakespeare, Marlowe and Webster were poets as well as dramatists. Seeing the play is but one part of the experience. The language is symphonic; listening to a recording is yet another experience. Reading the plays is perhaps the richest way of all to experience them: In the mind, which is both stage for the action and resonating chamber for the poetry. Its wide spotlight can tighten to a penlight's beam trained on each metaphor or epithet -- trained like an appraiser's loupe on a phrase like a perfectly cut jewel.

[Xanthe]

IIRC, the only Shakespeare we did in high school was Julius Caesar. Everyone had to memorize the "Friends, Romans..." speech and say it in the front of the class.

Most of my exposure to Shakespeare has been on PBS and the various films - Olivier's "Hamlet", Burton & Taylor's "Taming of the Shrew", Branagh's "Henry V", for example.

While I enjoy his work, it lights no spark within me. I think I like it best when I'm listening to a radio play of it, rather that reading it myself or watching it on the screen. When I'm hearing it read with its correct rhythms and my mind is filling in the visuals. The same thing works best for me with poetry.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Curricula shouldn't be determined by user ratings, should they? If they were, we'd have studied for fun without needing to go to school. Doesn't matter whether people's early course of study coincides with what they end up preferring to read.

Whether Shakespeare "lights a spark in you" or not (he isn't instant coffee!), he still needs to be taught. "Lend me your ears" might have been what you took away from Julius Caesar as a kid, but that isn't Shakespeare's fault any more than his rep was determined by hivemind.

Besides which, you might find yourself watching that play again some time and notice the "honorable men" speech. That's where I learned the technique of repeating an idea to make listeners come to the opposite conclusion. You can appear to be an advocate even as your words have the effect of damning evidence.

I've used it in offices and meetings and that technique still works. JC's full of bits like that.

[Miss Understood]

Originally Posted by wvcherrybomb

I absolutely agree. As the mother of a high school student, I am going to ask a few questions. I hope this is not a wide-spread problem.

I just asked my high school sons and they both said that they read the play (actual play) and they watched the modern version of the movie with DiCaprio. I remember when I was in high school reading Romeo and Juliet and going to see the play at the local college (we got extra credit for going).

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

To those who argue that Shakespeare shouldn't be read at all because he is a playwright and is therefore meant only to be seen:

By that logic, virtually all plays are meant only to be seen, and that is an absurdly limiting distinction between drama and literature. Better to say that one doesn't like reading Shakespeare than make such a dishonest argument.

Sorry, pal. People aren't "dishonest" merely because you don't agree with them. Actually, what's "dishonest" is to say people are making an argument that they are not actually making. Like "Shakespeare shouldn't be read at all..."

Make no mistake: Shakespeare, Marlowe and Webster were poets as well as dramatists. Seeing the play is but one part of the experience. The language is symphonic; listening to a recording is yet another experience. Reading the plays is perhaps the richest way of all to experience them: In the mind, which is both stage for the action and resonating chamber for the poetry. Its wide spotlight can tighten to a penlight's beam trained on each metaphor or epithet -- trained like an appraiser's loupe on a phrase like a perfectly cut jewel.

Seeing the play is the total experience. Shakespeare made plays. He wrote scripts as a means to that end. He - or someone - also directed the performances. Others acted.

Now, you can disassemble the play into constituent parts, and analyze them.

You can focus on the words (assuming, of course, you have the right words and not some scrivener's error or some other actor/playwright's interpolation) and improve your appreciation of the performance, or enjoy them in their own write. You can make much ado about that noting. All roads led to Room in those days, though that's not evident from the words on the page.

Or you can learn a bit about how actors performed in Shakespeare's time, and consider the implications of boys playing women's parts, and indulge in a little imagined homoerotic tension. And, of course, country matters are more clear when articulated in a particular way, with a gesture - neither thing being on the page, and perhaps unknown to the reader, even in annotation.

Or you can think about stage directions (which aren't written, putting aside the bear) and wonder about the significance of the torches in Julius Caesar in connection with what the audience saw, given the absence of electric lights. Of course, the plays are amended by every director. I'll bet most of them do a better job than a reader's mind. My brother-in-law is a movie director and has demonstrated this to me on occasion.

If all you do is read the plays, you only get hold of part of the elephant. The performance is the whole beast. You may (in fact, you will) see the elephant, as performed, more clearly by having read the play, but when push comes to shove, the play actually IS the thing.

(As for the difference between theatre & literature, I suggest that literature requires no enactment to be complete. Shakespeare's plays cry out for enactment. If they had not been performed for lo these many centuries, I doubt that they would still be taught, at least in high school. There are elements of literature embedded in the script, of course, but no completion without performance. Shakespeare obviously knew how his performers would enlarge - in fact, finish writing - his plays.)

[8annika.yael]

EVERYONE should have some sort of Shakesp"erience". At least in HS we KNOW students are exposed to it, have read at least one or two of his plays, and probably didn't enjoy it but will grow in some way from it.
#teamwilliam!

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Harmon

Sorry, pal. People aren't "dishonest" merely because you don't agree with them. Actually, what's "dishonest" is to say people are making an argument that they are not actually making.

What's demonstrably untrue is your assertion that the only argument being made is the one you decide has been made. Several arguments have been advanced here in favor of seeing versus reading the plays. Some of those have been boolean.

This might amaze you, but those arguments are not necessarily reducible to yours.

However, I thought it unnecessary and possibly rude to call people out by name simply to dispute their ideas. Clearly, you do not feel the same way.

It's also condescending of you to use the word "pal" to put your perceived rivals in their place. You seem to be trying to degrade the emotional tone of a conversation about Shakespeare for reasons known only to you.

That said, let's return to the actual topic.

================

Seeing the play is the total experience. Shakespeare made plays. He wrote scripts as a means to that end.

It is reductive to decide that the experience of a play is purely a matter of seeing it acted, or to reduce the text of a play to a script intended to be filmed. Certain rare scripts are so beautifully written that they do deserve to be read and reread like novels. But screenplays are often provisional and incomplete, since so much depends on the rewrites of actors and directors, and on the visual narrative style of the director, since cameras not only show us the action, as a theatrical performance does, but tell us how to see it, swiveling and panning and drawing back according to the director's point of view. They also play with our sense of time far more than performers do through editing and pacing that is not contained within the script. There is constant background music; there are montages. No, a script isn't quite the same critter as a play any more than theater is film.

Besides which, insisting that any watered-down acted version of Shakespeare is more Shakespeare than the actual texts says more about one's reading habits than -- pardon the neologism -- formatical correctness.

Seeing the play is the total experience.

Plays with levels of archaic language must be studied to be understood. Seeing Shakespeare can be a great experience, but it is hardly the "total" experience. It is but one part of the experience. There is no substitute for reading him carefully and learning to understand the language. Look at the long history of poets and writers who claim Shakespeare's influence -- accomplished and indelible writers who are not known for drama nor, in many cases, who wrote any plays at all. What were they gleaning from Shakespeare if not his sense of language and structure? Dickens might -- and I say might -- have focused on characters, but Alexander Pope was clearly concerned with the writing itself.

Now, you can disassemble the play into constituent parts, and analyze them.

What's ironic is that every example you've given is dependent on prior study, and to study is to return to the text. Some of it can be gleaned from documentaries, but everything you've mentioned is found in a comprehensively annotated and researched edition such as The Riverside Shakespeare.

You might argue that essays and annotations can occasionally incorporate superseded information and disproved assumptions, but that is not a problem with reading itself, nor do films and theatrical performances necessarily reflect the latest information about Shakespeare. It is an artifact of the reality that scholarship evolves and history is constantly being researched.

You can focus on the words (assuming, of course, you have the right words and not some scrivener's error or some other actor/playwright's interpolation)

Which is best done by reading a complete and authoritative version of a play and not trusting that whatever parties have edited the play for film or performance has been faithful.

and improve your appreciation of the performance, or enjoy them in their own write. You can make much ado about that noting. All roads led to Room in those days, though that's not evident from the words on the page.

"In his own write," if so intended, is a joke of John Lennon's. Odd to see it here. Much ado about "noting"? I'd assume you were making the same joke Shakespeare did throughout that play if you hadn't followed it with the malapropism "all roads lead to Room." But perhaps you're making a pun about the size of the stage.

Normally, wordplay has some sort of trajectory, in which case the cramped quarters where people might be "noting" things leads to "Room." But then "in their own write" doesn't fit as an aspect of a performance even as a possible pomo description of performance variables as active rewriting.

Or you can learn a bit about how actors performed in Shakespeare's time, and consider the implications of boys playing women's parts, and indulge in a little imagined homoerotic tension.

Which, again, is most efficiently and exhaustively done by studying the plays, the annotations and the historical background. You're making a very good case for the importance of reading Shakespeare.

And, of course, country matters are more clear when articulated in a particular way, with a gesture - neither thing being on the page, and perhaps unknown to the reader, even in annotation.

By "country matters," you might mean the ways in which dialects, visual cues such as flags, customs, pageantries and even gestures are associated during the performance with distinct and recognizable places.

What you forget is that readers fill most of that in with their imaginations -- the sound of people from other places, the look of this or that court, etc. The imagination is a muscle that needs to be exercised, and in a non-linear, briefly-attentive multimedia society like ours, it is in danger of atrophying without writers like Shakespeare.

You might ask: But what about things the reader doesn't know enough about to imagine? There, again, reading is the answer. Whatever is not filled in by Shakespeare's own words can be gleaned by the words that surround his, and far more lastingly than during the course of a single performance: The annotations, the introductions, the study materials with which most teachers and professors are likely to provide you.

Some playwrights write less and imply a myriad of interpretations, leaving it to the actors to imply more than is apparent. But Shakespeare's directions are clear in the very lines the actors speak, which means they are clear to readers as well: In that way, his plays are quite self-contained.

This doesn't mean that actors' jobs are already done, nor does it mean that, say, King Lear is emptied of ambiguities. Unlike the States, sadly, England which has a national theater, and actors there are not adverse to studying Shakespeare throughout their lives. Clearly this would be fruitless if Shakespeare's plays weren't meant to be performed. But let's not be boolean. The best way to study Shakespeare is to read him, but it is not necessarily the best way to enjoy him. Few performances I've seen have come close to the transports of reading him (and with that, many actors would agree). But that does not mean everyone has to feel the same way, nor does it mean that less enjoyable versions must be unenjoyable.

If all you do is read the plays, you only get hold of part of the elephant.

Let me remind you of something you said earlier: "What's 'dishonest' is to say people are making an argument that they are not actually making."

I would argue that far more of the unadulterated is available to the reader than the spectator -- especially the spectator who watches a flick rather than a performance -- but that doesn't mean I'm arguing that people shouldn't see the plays. No one has said that "all [they] do is read the plays." The teachers and professors I've known personally have assigned the plays to be read but also assigned or recommended video'd performances to compliment them. Some have even supplemented reading with the Olivier films.

The person who reads the plays will be far better equipped to understand them and more conversant in their complexities than someone who only watches them. The person who does both but studies the plays carefully on the page has the best of both worlds.

"(As for the difference between theatre & literature, I suggest that literature requires no enactment to be complete."

That is a very unusual definition of literature, and it is not borne out by the ideas of many playwrights. If Samuel Beckett is not literature, then I can't imagine who is.

[kennyc]

Oh My a knock-down drag-out about Shakespeare. Maybe better move this to the Politics and Religion section.

Originally Posted by kennyc

Oh My a knock-down drag-out about Shakespeare. Maybe better move this to the Politics and Religion section.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!

My only reservation about having a class watch Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo and Juliet and saying they have now studied the play is still that they are watching a highly edited version and will retain little but the major plot points. Then again what does an old fool like me know about what's best for today's students?

Fool: If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I'ld have thee beaten
for being old before thy time.

KING LEAR: How's that?

Fool: Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst
been wise.

KING LEAR: O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven
Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

My only reservation about having a class watch Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo and Juliet and saying they have now studied the play

Clearly watching that movie - or, for that matter, going to see a performance at the Royal Shakespeare Company (which I am in the fortunate position of being able to do with a 90 minute drive) - does not, in any way whatever, constitute "studying the play". Anyone who makes that claim is being very silly . However, watching a performance of the play - or even, if that's not feasible, watching a movie - is a very useful adjunct to studying it.

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Clearly watching that movie - or, for that matter, going to see a performance at the Royal Shakespeare Company (which I am in the fortunate position of being able to do with a 90 minute drive) - does not, in any way whatever, constitute "studying the play". Anyone who makes that claim is being very silly . However, watching a performance of the play - or even, if that's not feasible, watching a movie - is a very useful adjunct to studying it.

You are lucky indeed and I completely agree. The only time I got to see an actual Shakespeare play other than the movie versions done by Branagh and others was a production my little liberal arts college in Louisiana did of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It wasn't a great production but at least there was a good-looking male dancing student playing one of the fairies and wearing not too much more than glitter and a bathing suit.

Anyway, of course they should read Shakespeare. Shakespeare is amazing and the foundation of much of our language. Also, how else could they have a deeper appreciation for the Shakespeare thread in Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels and the movie Shakespeare in Love, two of my favorite things?

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

By "country matters," you might mean the ways in which dialects, visual cues such as flags, customs, pageantries and even gestures are associated during the performance with distinct and recognizable places.

You know, I kind of think you're illustrating Harmon's point about

Originally Posted by Harmon

If all you do is read the plays, you only get hold of part of the elephant. The performance is the whole beast. You may (in fact, you will) see the elephant, as performed, more clearly by having read the play, but when push comes to shove, the play actually IS the thing.

"Country matters" is a sex joke from Hamlet. He's talking to Ophelia, and asks if he should lie in her lap. When she says no, he says he meant to lay his "head" in her lap (interpret that as you like it) and asks if she thought he was speaking of "country matters" (read that out loud, knowing what you know now) and then after her reply, makes a remark about lying between maids' legs in case the audience didn't get it the first couple of times.

For all your advocacy of emphasizing the simple reading of the plays* as the overriding primary experience, and all your erudition in identifying the other allusions referenced in that post, you seem to have not picked up this fairly basic bit of works-great-on-stage wordplay.

Incidentally, I first saw this demonstrated via Slings and Arrows, a Canadian TV series about the tribulations of a faux-Stratford Festival Shakespearean theatre town each season as it puts on new plays, which is, by the way, excellent entertainment (the living room sword-fight! the nude glow-in-the-dark paint exercise!).

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

If Samuel Beckett is not literature, then I can't imagine who is.

Every time I see his name, I'm tempted to declaim "Will nobody rid me of this turbulent playwright?" And then write a parody I, Godot musical to the tune of the Alan Parsons Project album.

Also, I think there was someone way upthread who asked about what people saw in the graphic novel adaptations? I can't find it now and have some errands to run this afternoon, but I picked up a couple of the GN Shakespeare adaptations from the library.

I'll scan a couple of sample pages when I've got some more free time to demonstrate how they often work quite well by providing pictures to enhance the words (nearly always direct, if selective, actual line reproductions, in case anyone was wondering) in a different, but complementary way to how stage productions and films do it.

* This bit I cheerfully back up, provided it's an annotated version, because at this point in the language shift you need the annotations. But I think the more media you experience something through, the potentially better your understanding gets as you see it from different viewpoints through new "eyes", so to speak.

[HistoryWes]

They should GET to read Shakespeare.

[Joykins]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Every time I see his name, I'm tempted to declaim "Will nobody rid me of this turbulent playwright?" And then write a parody I, Godot musical to the tune of the Alan Parsons Project album.

[spellbanisher]

The best way to get kids to read Shakespeare is to forbid them to read his works.