Should Shakespeare Be Taught in High School?
I teach people who are either going to be ELA teachers or who are already are ELA teachers, and one of my students recently asked me “Should Shakespeare Be Taught in High School?” I get this question once in a while, and my answer has become more consistent over the past few years.
There is nothing wrong with asking our students to read something they would never choose for themselves, to push them out of their comfort zone. Unfortunately, that’s not what most ELA teachers do when we “teach” Shakespeare. And that’s because schools ELA teachers are not asked either. It is assumed that they will, or they are outright told they must teach Hamlet or Macbeth or Othello. It is not voluntary. This lack of freedom doesn’t only apply to Shakespeare as curriculum in our education system, and it exaggerates the “To teach Shakespeare or Not to teach Shakespeare?” problem.
A friend of mine was conducting research on teaching in the Lowell Public Schools a few years back and while interviewing an honors student (an immigrant from Southeast Asia) he asked her which classes she enjoyed and which ones she did not. She said that she disliked ELA the most, because the teacher was forcing the class to read Macbeth, and she did not understand it at all. She went on to describe how the format of the play confused her. The archaic language confused her, the themes and the allusions were strange, and the characters seemed unreal. She boldly told my friend that she “hated going to English class because of William Shakespeare.”
In that moment Shakespeare, who never intended anyone to READ his scripts, rolled over in his grave. He was the reason someone hated learning about literature and going to school.
I imagine an interview with Shakespeare on a fictitious late night talk show in London, circa 1599.
TALK SHOW HOST: Thank you Mr. Shakespeare for coming on the show tonight, and congratulations on the grand opening of your new theatre in Southwork. Is it safe for us to assume that The Lord Chamberlain’s Men will be performing your latest work, Hamlet, there this coming season?
SHAKESPEARE: Well, yes, yes. Thank you for having me on the show. Mr. Burbage, of course, will be playing the role of Prince Hamlet this coming season in our new venue. We are excited about the new theatre, and we will introduce some other new plays as well.
TALK SHOW HOST: Onto another topic, if I may? (The bard nods and smiles wryly.) I would like to ask you a question about school. The Royal Secondary School in Newcastle announced that they plan to add a number of your plays to their core literature curriculum.
SHAKESPEARE: (Visibly troubled) I was dismayed when I heard about this.
TALK SHOW HOST: I am confused. I imagined that you would be honored.
SHAKESPEARE: Please, do forgive me. Of course, I am honored, but my plays are meant for the stage. When I write them, I envision only that people will experience them as members of an audience in a playhouse. On the page? They are — Well, they are simply — not meant for public consumption in that form.
TALK SHOW HOST: Are the headmasters of Royal Secondary Academy in the wrong?
SHAKESPEARE: To say that they are in the wrong? Is an overstatement. I am no pedagogue, for sure. Perhaps, misguided is the right word. People, young adults especially, will not enjoy these stories, unless they are properly staged by professional Theatre Companies. I imagine there must be better choices of reading materials available for schools than using scripts meant for the stage.
Granted, any great ELA teacher can make Shakespeare fun and even exciting, but when the average ELA teacher is forced to teach his or her average students to read a play by William Shakespeare, the students and the teacher are also forced into a difficult, nearly impossible situation. They must extract contemporary meaning from an archaic script, written in blank verse with allusions to people, places and events that are neither interesting nor relevant to them in any way. And that bad experience will color all of their ELA classes going forward, and for some it will stain the activity of reading itself.
To this, policymakers, pundits and politicians who have never taught Shakespeare in an ELA classroom before may ask “So, how can we make all ELA teachers great?” We can’t, of course. Anyone who thinks we can, does not understand the concept of “greatness.” However, there are some things we can do.
First of all, force is usually the problem. Not Shakespeare. Force can have a very negative effect on learners. Most of us, at any age, resist, resent and even rebel against being forced to do new things, which only requires more force from teachers to regain control, thus creating a tension for which the consequences mean death to the sacred and necessary student/teacher relationship. Those students who do not resist, conversely comply, and compliance is a subtle form of intellectual death.
Those students who do comply with their teachers’ demands to read Hamlet or Macbeth for ELA class, usually do so because they have been domesticated. And though they might be linguistically talented, and need the least help from their teachers, the least amount of encouragement and the least care, they are also dependent learners, who are less capable of thinking outside of the box. Their ability to generate original thoughts and ideas, to know themselves and to use their imaginations is compromised every time they submit the subordination of being forced to do this or that.
The resistant students, whether quietly passive-aggressive or loudly defiant, lose not only their opportunity to learn how to comprehend text but more tragically, lose their motivation to try after fighting for their autonomy and losing. These are the moments when teachers confuse force with care, only encouraging more resistance from adolescents whose academic needs remain unmet in that moment, who are developmentally wired to seek autonomy through resistance and even rebellion in their desire to enter adulthood. Their academic needs and subsequent resistance to being forced to read and respond to complex texts, written in verse, from the Elizabethan Period, when they already find simpler contemporary texts, challenging, quickly become branded as insubordination. When they oppose us, we forget that they still need us. What do we do?
So, #1. Do not force it.
I taught Hamlet to reluctant readers when I was a high school English teacher. At one point I did it completely wrong. I used force, directing students’ attention to this or that about the play that I thought was important to know. It didn’t work, and I blamed my students for that at the time.
Years later, I taught Hamlet carefully and gently with little or no force. I helped them understand HOW to read strange texts. I let go of my need for them to KNOW Hamlet as a literary work with a place in the Canon of Western Thought. Instead, I used Hamlet a means instead of an end. I used it to teach my students what to do when they are confronted with a strange text that is old and foreign. Doing this bled the moral authority out of my teaching veins, giving Hamlet a practical purpose for me and for my students.
#2. Consciously choose your purpose for teaching Shakespeare before teaching it, and do NOT let “cultural literacy” be the reason. Instead, decide that learning the skill of decoding complex, even strange text is more important.
Teaching Shakespeare is overrated, and cultural literacy is even more overrated, but plays like Hamlet can be wonderful to experience, to teach and to learn, if done with care, gently, dare I say — with love, for both the artistic qualities and the beauty of William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, and for our students — whose need to at least NOT HATE reading, is absolutely more important than being culturally literate. So, go ahead and teach Shakespeare, as long as doing so doesn’t end in tragedy for you or your students. Because if you teach King Lear and even one of your students hates reading as a result, then it not only wasn’t worth the time and energy, but your endeavor to do so was antithetical to promoting literacy and reduced the chances that that student ever will find Shakespeare worth investigating. I hope that people have the chance to become culturally literate, but the cultural literacy (i.e. E.D. Hirsch) that has been promoted in American schools for the past 100 years is a form of “essentialism” that reinforces the dominant (white, male, straight, Christian) culture, which is neither healthy for students who are non-white, non-Christian, homosexual women nor straight, white dudes like me.
As teachers, we must not choose cultural literacy over — just, plain literacy. What good are we doing our students, if half the class is turned off to reading any texts, and going forward read less — in general — because we spent three weeks on Othello? We must also not be so inclusive of Shakespeare that we are exclusive of literature that reflects our students’ identities. Shakespeare is important, but it is not more important that our students.
#3. Remember that just because WE loved Shakespeare, that doesn’t mean everyone else will. We were not only English majors in college, but we are such literature nerds that we have dedicated our lives to literature as English Teachers.
It is easy to forget that we have an advanced linguistic intelligence. Interpreting text comes easy to us. Most of our students cannot access this complex language the way we can, as fast as we can. All our students don’t have to and hopefully all of them won’t dedicate their lives to books, poems and stories as we have. Somebody has to do all the other things that need doing. They need to learn how to read, and Shakespeare can be a part of our mission to do that, but it doesn’t have to be. If there is another way to teach our students to decode, comprehend and relate to text, that works better for them, shouldn’t we be using it?
It’s safe to assume that many of your students will not appreciate Shakespeare at first blush. I remember my first go round with The Bard. I was in High School and felt confused, insecure and scared, which had nothing at all to do with Shakespeare. It had everything to do with me and a little bit to do with the way my English teacher taught it. I majored in English a few years later, became an English teacher and went back to school to learn more about literature, which makes me (us) quite different from most people. If my first experience with Shakespeare was less than positive, and I became an English teacher, you can bet that most of your students do not fall in love with his plays when assigned in high school. The ting is. Our students don’t have to love Shakespeare to be educated people. Hell, they don’t even have to read Shakespeare to be educated, or literate or culturally literate people, and despite our assigning his plays, many of our students simply don’t do the reading. After all, there are numerous film versions of Shakespeare’s plays and even more of his plays staged live around the world all the time, which is how they were meant to be experienced anyway.
#4. If you do teach Shakespeare’s plays, don’t get hung up on making your students read every word of the plays.
I taught in a high school for a long time, and I understand that sometimes teachers are also forced to do things, to teach specific curricula, which is not only wrong but impractical. So, if you are forced to teach Shakespeare, you might want to experiment with How you do it. I have used both films and live plays to teach the likes of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and other plays by Shakespeare with great success, in a variety of ways. Of course, we used isolated and specific soliloquies so we could explicate them. We extracted sections of dialog to practice interpreting, and we copied and pasted individual scenes that we could analyze into blogs, webpages, Powerpoints and onto googledocs, because those few times, early in my teaching career when I pushed students to read entire plays, I found that most of them either: read and did not understand most of the play or lied and said they read it, when they did not. Either way, assigning them the whole play never helped to develop an appreciation among my students for Shakespearean plays, never helped to enhance their cultural literacy or their plain old literacy. If anything, the opposite occurred. They were turned off to reading as a result.
#5 Resist the urge to assign a literary analysis essay that is based on a Shakespearean play.
I have done this, more than once. It failed every time. I guess I am a slow learner. Why did it fail? My goal for teaching students how to write a literary analysis was so they could learn to interpret complex text and then explain their interpretations in formal writing. For the average adolescent, that is a very heavy lift. Writing a literary analysis essay is a challenging task, and when we add to that the interpretation of dense, complex, highly symbolic, even archaic language, we are piling the challenging on top of the difficult. And, in doing, we stack the odds against our success, and more importantly against theirs.
When I made this mistake, many of my students crashed and burned very early, just trying to get their heads around the tasks within the task. And those who endured, became frustrated with the complexity of this meta-task and obsessed with being right about their interpretation, only to resent me, resent Shakespeare’s legacy and even resent the fictitious characters in the play, which made me sad. Assigning a literary analysis essay caused all of my students to associate the task of writing with pain. When I finally figured this out, I stopped doing it. Although people usually learn best when they are outside their comfort zone, I was putting them in pain, which is different.
I had to let go of the reverence I once had for the works of William Shakespeare, because I loved my students, who were alive and present in my life. Shakespeare departed this world long ago. He was playwright whose plays are impressive. There is no doubt about that, but they are only plays. They are not people. Yes, Shakespeare’s plays are a fixture in our culture, but that does not mean they are sacred. If a student or even students don’t understand or like Shakespeare’s plays, if they don’t read his plays, that isn’t a tragedy. If they hate you, hate Shakespeare, hate reading or writing that is tragic. Even worse, if they feel stupid or unworthy because they don’t get it his language, that is dangerous.
Neither your students, nor you need go to prison nor be bound in a nutshell for relaxing your pedagogical grip where Shakespeare is concerned. This is a more normal occurrence in English classes than most of us are willing to acknowledge. After all, such acceptance is neither good nor bad, unless our thinking makes it so.