Download Source B “Shakespeare: Is The Bard`s Work Still Relevant?”

Ms. Berger/Mr. Longsworth – E3
BOSS (M393)
Common Core Performance Task – Argument Writing
In preparation for our reading Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, you will write a paper discussing the
following topic:
 Are Shakespeare’s plays still relevant today? Can/should today’s students
relate to Shakespeare?
Shakespeare wrote his plays 400 years ago, yet students and others still read his works, and productions of his
plays (in both theater and film) are still popular. However, there are challenges reading his plays – particularly,
e.g., the Old English language he wrote in. Many believe he is still relevant because his plays involve timeless,
universal themes (love, betrayal, greed, power, tragedy, comedy, etc.). You may focus on, e.g.: appreciation of
Shakespeare; the traditional/historical and literary importance of Shakespeare; the challenges of Shakespeare’s
works; are Shakespeare’s work still relevant and timeless; whether today’s students can relate to Shakespeare’s
works; etc.
I have provided the “research” you will rely on in your paper. You will read the Sources/articles below and
attached, and incorporate them into your discussion. You should not just summarize the Sources – your
challenge is to “synthesize” (effectively combine) what you learned from the Sources into your analysis. You
choose what portions of the Sources you what to incorporate into your discussion. You must rely on at least
three (3) of the Sources in your discussion (but may want to use more). You must discuss “opposing” views
– counterclaims - in your paper and you may discuss your own views and opinions.
Your paper must be a full 2-3 pages in length and properly word processed (Times New Roman, 12-point
type, double-spaced, etc.). Feel free to quote from the Sources, but you MUST place any text taken
directly from them in quotation marks – remember, I gave you and know the Sources! You will cite to the
Sources where you rely on them in your discussion as I’ve indicated below.


“Why Teach Shakespeare?” by K. Bagdanov, www.wordpress.com (2008)
“Shakespeare: Is The Bard’s Work Still Relevant?” by Katy Russell,
www.helium.com (2007)
 Source C
“Shakespeare: Our Contemporary?” by Gill Stoker, www.open2.net (2005)
 Source D
“Why Is Shakespeare Still So Popular?” by Jenny Hall, www.research.utoronto.ca
(2009)
 Source E
“Much Ado About Nothing Much” by Peter Beech, www.guardian.co.uk (2009)
 Source F
Macbeth – Shakespeare Made Easy (Barron’s), p.6-14
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Source A
Source B
Citing the Sources (within your writing):
A recent survey of high school freshmen and sophomores revealed that some of them “still do not get the
message that low and failing grades on their transcripts will come back to ‘haunt’ them.” (Source B) However,
they just need to look at seniors, who also did not take school seriously, now struggling to graduate on time and
with very limited college opportunities. (Source D) If they only knew…
* At the end of your paper, list the FULL citations of the Sources you relied on – use my list above.
Source A
“Why Teach Shakespeare?”
By K. Bagdanov, August 11, 2008
Substantive Education, www.wordpress.com
In preparation for my class this year on Shakespeare (one of my favorites to teach) I’ve been
doing some reading. One book that has been helpful in practical ways in organizing my lessons is Teaching
Shakespeare, by Rex Gibson. Here is a summary on why we should continue to teach Shakespeare, even to
young students. Much of the following is taken directly from the book, in some places I’ve just altered it enough
to connect the ideas. If you want some creative and practical help with this topic you really should consider this
book. (My class will have students from 4th grade thru high school all working together, it works surprisingly
well and each time I teach it I’m surprised by the insights of some of the younger kids and that they will argue
their position with students much older than they are.
The first reason to continue to teach Shakespeare is that Shakespeare deals with familiar and abiding concerns.
Shakespeare’s characters, stories and themes have been, and still are, a source of meaning and significance for
every generation. For example, students will find the discussions between Juliet and her controlling father
recognizable and familiar, and an excellent spur to discussing parent child relationships. In all of his plays the
emotions expressed reach across the centuries; love, hate, awe, tenderness, anger, despair, jealousy,
contempt, fear, courage, wonder. The plays raise questions of morality, politics, war, wealth, and death. Many
of the plays explore the gap that exists between public appearance and private practice…a problem that is just
as relevant today. As characters struggle with the interconnections between the individual and society students
are forced to question their own moral choices and how much they, personally, are affected by our societal
values, and our American culture.
Secondly, to study Shakespeare is to acquire all kinds of knowledge, not just the knowledge of the plot of
another play. It might be an increased vocabulary, or an understanding of the Elizabethan stage. The Tempest
can motivate students to research the colonisation of the Americas , or the growth of Renaissance science and
literature. The history and Roman plays offer opportunities for developing different kinds of historical
understanding.
Studying Shakespeare also allows an addition to knowledge as students explore human feelings in ways that
give mental, physical and emotional realese, but in the safe condition of a classroom. Enacting Shakespeare can
help students generate self-confidence and learn to confront and control their own emotions. It can lead to
greater understanding and empathy. To express it less prosaically, Shakespeare develops the understanding of
the heart.
Third, Shakespeare uses many different styles of language and plays all kinds of language games. His language
provides students with rich models for study, imitation, and expressive personal re-creation. Shakespeare was
fascinated by language and constantly explored and stretched it’s power and limitations. As students come to
grips with the language in active explorations, they gain insight into the power of language and become
enfranchised as readers, writers, speakers, listeners, and actors.
Fourth, and my personal favorite, education is about ‘opening doors’. It is concerned that individuals should not
be imprisoned in a single point of view, confined solely to local knowledge and beliefs. Education shows that
‘there is a world elsewhere’ beyond the familiar and everyday. Shakespeare invites students to develop a deep
acquaintance with those characters, to experience their extremes of emotion, to imaginatively inhabit their
remote worlds, and to learn from those close encounters with otherness.
Every student is entitled to make the acquaintance of genius. Shakespeare remains a genius of outstanding
significance in the development of English language, literature and drama. All students should have
opportunities through practical experience, to make up their own minds about what Shakespeare might hold for
them.
Source B
“Shakespeare: Is The Bard's Work Still Relevant?”
By Katy Russell
February 10, 2007
www.helium.com
To learn Shakespeare or not to learn Shakespeare? That is the question. Every child in Britain since the 17th
century has learnt what there was Much Ado about, the real name of the Scottish play, and just why Romeo
loved Juliet. However, it is now 2006, and we have to consider what the actual relevance of As You Like It is to
modern schoolchildren.
Personally, I have nothing against William Shakespeare. However, when it is forced upon children as young as
11, I have to wince. Surely it is unfair to place such an irrelevant topic upon children and call it compulsory.
How many 11 year olds do you know who can fully contemplate the sentence "Let every eye negotiate for itself
and trust no agent; for beauty is a witch against whose charms faith melteth in blood"?
Of course, if Shakespeare was written today, it would be very different. Romeo would be called Ryan, Juliet
would be called Jamie-Lee, and both Ryan and Jamie-Lee would be on antidepressants. Every other word would
be "Baby" and they'd be internet lovers. We'd have Ryan and Jamie-Lee action figures, and dozens of films and
books. This is what would appeal to the 11-year-olds of Britain in a language they understand.
Admittedly, Shakespeare was not written today. Marked by an abundance of metaphorical concepts and words
which have no meaning in the 21st century, Shakespeare's many texts are becoming the bane of most modern
schoolchildren's lives.
Do you remember studying Shakespeare at school? Yes, I bet you do. And I also bet it was tedious. Once you
got to college, of course, that was different. It was optional and you were doing it for the sheer love of it. But
when you were 11, you were more concerned about whose house you were going to that evening, than the
profound and beautiful texts of William Shakespeare. I'm also betting your first impression of A Midsummer
Night's Dream was not "Oh wow, how amazing!". In fact, I'm more than certain it was one generalised jeer of
"Weirdo". There is no possible way children can be expected to take seriously plays which involve fairies and
men called Bottom'. Surely texts like this should be left until children are at least at the age where the word
bottom' is no longer hilarious.
I am not denying that Shakespeare's texts were an amazing work of art and should be appreciated; I'm saying
the opposite. Yes, Shakespeare was amazing. But that was 1585; this is now. Our problems are no longer
arranged marriages and courts of kings; they are teenage pregnancy and drugs. Surely something more relevant
to the lives that these children are living should be taught to them?
Some things remain timeless, but Shakespeare is not one of those things. Shakespeare is associated with Queen
Elizabeth I and the 16th Century, not Queen Elizabeth II and the 21st Century. Shakespeare is something that
should remain in it's original brackets of English literature, and should be studied as such in an optional and
higher level. No child under the age of 16 should be studying Shakespeare unless it is for the fundamental joy of
it; it's just not right.
I'm not saying we should all forget about Shakespeare and his teachings. No. I'm saying we should take more
care about to whom we teach them. Surely Romeo and Juliet would be more useful in a classroom of eager 17year-old romantics than a classroom full of 11-year-old worshippers of 50 Cent'. It's just common sense. We
should know by now the most effective manner of teachings is to associate the class with something the
children feel comfortable and familiar with. Not "But no more deep will I endart mine eye than your consent
gives strength to make it fly". Children should be out on the streets playing, not milling through the full text of
King Lear and A Winter's Tale. Surely they can read the overpoweringly time-consuming works once their
childhood is over. Childhood is for frolicking and enjoyment, not having to practically learn a new language to
write one essay.
Perhaps a better way to teach Shakespeare to younger children is to use West Side Story, the most well known
remake of Romeo and Juliet (apart from Baz Luhrumann's of the same title) is in a sociolect that the children of
modern times would understand without difficulty and is in a setting that they would find interesting.
Also, who is to say we should be studying Shakespeare when there are so many great poets, playwrights and
novelists in the 21st century that actually deal with relevant issues? The novel Junk by Melvin Burgess is
wholly more attuned to modern social issues than The Taming of The Shrew. Children will find more comfort in
"Pirates of the Caribbean" than Macbeth. "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls fills them with more sentimental feeling
than "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun".
Times are changing, and with it, so should teaching. There is no point trying to teach an iPod generation about
tape players. They need to know the present so they can deal with the future.
Shakespeare is not a valuable life skill.
If you intend to be a professor of English Literature or a librarian, it's great. If you intend to be a scientist,
what's the point? Shakespeare does not increase or decrease your ability to conduct heart surgery, so why must
so many valuable and intelligent people be subjected to compulsory Richard III studies? It is completely insane.
If you want to study Shakespeare, that's your choice. If your children want to study Shakespeare, again, that's
their choice. I'm not saying don't. I'm saying you shouldn't have to.
No-one should be forced to do what they shouldn't have to, especially irrelevant and obscure matters such as
Shakespeare; give me Steven Spielberg instead any day. You can keep your Shakespeare audio tapes. I'm happy
enough with my “Shakespeare's Sister” on my iPod.
Source C
“Shakespeare: Our Contemporary?”
By Gill Stoker
June 10, 2005
BBC the Open University, www.open2.net
The writer considers to what extent Shekespeare would be at home in our contemporary world.
Is Shakespeare relevant today? Ask the first person you meet in the street, "What comes into you mind
when I say Shakespeare?" and there's a good chance they'll quote the famous line "To be or not to be" words spoken by a young man, traumatized by his father's death, and so unhappy that he's considering
putting an end to his own life.
There are countless situations like this in Shakespeare's plays, that can be put into the category of 'the
human condition' - part of what it means to be human, something that never changes from century to
century, or country to country, despite all the differences in knowledge, culture and emphasis.
This is one good reason why Shakespeare's plays continue to be performed, not just in English-speaking
countries, but also in translation throughout the world. Shakespeare's characters fall in love, and out of it,
take a dislike to each other, betray each other, misunderstand each other, argue, fight and kill each other,
are angry, sad, happy, jealous, envious, distrustful, untrustworthy, deceptive, magnanimous, forgiving... experiencing practically every human emotion you can think of, and every human situation.
Also, the social issues of Shakespeare's day which feature in the plays - class division, racism, sexuality,
intolerance, the role and status of women, crime, war, death, disease - are still the burning issues in
today's dysfunctional global society.
Of course one of the big arguments against Shakespeare's relevance is the language the plays are written
in - it can be hard going if you're reading one of his plays for the first time, and trying to make sense of it.
But there are ways round this - I don't think it's 'cheating' to watch a play in the theatre or on video first,
or to play an audio version and follow the printed text at the same time. After all, Shakespeare wrote his
plays to be performed, not to be read in miserable isolation. By hearing, and preferably seeing a group of
actors embodying the characters, it's possible to get a good sense of the story without grinding to a halt
and becoming disheartened. The more plays that are enjoyed in this way - and enjoyment should be the
keyword - the clearer a picture emerges of the universal and relevant situations which Shakespeare wrote
about.
That's fine, I hear you say, but what about all the fantasy stuff in Shakespeare - ghosts, for example?
Hamlet's father coming back as a ghost, to tell his son how he died. Banquo's ghost terrifying Macbeth at
the dinner table. We're living in a scientific age now, and ghosts are no longer relevant, are they?
But we only have to look at the TV schedules to see that the supernatural is still a very popular subject there's a boom industry in ghost walks, books about the supernatural, and programmes such as Living
TV's Most Haunted series [a British TV mystery series] to send shivers up and down the viewer's spine, in
the same way that the appearance of ghosts on stage at the Globe Theatre on Bankside thrilled
Shakespeare's first audiences. Admittedly, instead of Old Hamlet describing his own 'most horrible'
murder, we get Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged, putting the record straight to Derek Acorah
about how many times she pulled the trigger, and confirming that she and her victim-lover have made up
their quarrel and are now living happily together in the spirit world. In fact the program has had such an
impact on the popular psyche that it's affecting house sales - estate agents report that potential buyers
can be put off if they think a house is haunted, or even if they discover that someone died there, and one
well-known actress actually sold her house last year because a ghost ordered her to leave!
Of course there are still a few far-fetched aspects in Shakespeare's plays that are hard to go along with
today - for example all those young women dressing as boys, for the purpose of disguise. But there are
some modern equivalents - I saw a documentary recently, showing how teenage girls living on the streets
of Brazil deliberately dress in a boyish way to avoid being attacked.
A better-known example is Julia Roberts in the film Sleeping with the Enemy, dressing as a boy to pay a
clandestine visit to her mother in a nursing home. And talking of films, this modern medium has given
Shakespeare's plays a new lease of life, and introduced them to a much wider audience than would ever
have contemplated going to the theatre. The Romeo and Juliet story has always been one of the best
known, and millions of people have seen the Baz Luhrmann version, which translated so well into a
modern Californian setting.
And what about Shakespeare himself? Does he bear any similarity to a typical modern man? Well, from
the little we know about him, he was surely what today we would call 'driven', leaving his wife and family
behind him in Stratford to pursue his career in London. In his thirties he may have gone through a crisis of
sexual identity; he was a practical man of the theatre, knowing what paid and what didn't, and creating
his own 'market'. He socialised in the pub with his friends and colleagues; he knew how to write to please
audiences of all classes; he was successful enough to gain royal patronage, and to attract the enmity of
rival playwrights and poets; he had no time for pomposity, pedantry or puritanism; he may have
associated with prostitutes; he may have contracted a sexually transmitted disease.
It's just that, while living life to the full, he also had the magical ability to write the most amazing plays to
entertain his contemporaries. Those plays are still entertaining people, whether in authentic historical
performance or modern interpretation on the stage, or in countless film and TV adaptations throughout
the world.
Source D
“Why Is Shakespeare Still So Popular?”
Jenny Hall interviews Professor Holger Syme
June 10, 2009
University of Toronto, www.research.utoronto.ca
As the summer season of Ontario’s Stratford festival [Shakespeare festival] gears up, we turned to Professor Holger Syme of English and
Drama at the University of Toronto at Mississauga to help us understand why the Bard endures four centuries after his death.
Why does Shakespeare endure?
There are two almost completely different answers depending on what you take that question to mean. For the last 300 years Shakespeare has
had two lives, one on the page and one on the stage. There have been longstanding debates among academics about what the legitimate
approach to Shakespeare is. Should we teach his works as plays that need to be performed or should we teach them as if they were written to
be read?
There’s a division between these two modes of survival for Shakespeare. On the literary side, Shakespeare is exceptional, but not quite as
unique as we might think. He is one of a small selection of authors who has always been in the canon of standard texts that make up English
literature. This group includes people like Chaucer and Milton—names that have never really dropped out of the canon. And as such, his works
have commanded an increasing degree of close textual attention, at times almost veneration.
What about on stage? How has Shakespeare endured in the theatre?
If you look over the last couple of hundred years at the way Shakespeare has survived in the theatre, there’s been a major shift, especially in
the 20th century. Before then, the reason Shakespeare survives is because there’s a fairly limited respect for the text. For example, by the late
17th century, King Lear had a happy ending. In Shakespeare’s King Lear both Lear and his daughter Cordelia die. By the late 17th century
there’s a revised version where they both survive apparently because audiences preferred this more optimistic conclusion. The same thing
happens to most of Shakespeare’s major plays, though some of them are skewed the other way, becoming more rather than less gruesome.
But these changes weren’t necessarily pitched as adaptations—they’re what passed for Shakespeare at the time. What was performed on
stage was what worked, based on commercial and entertainment value.
Starting in the mid-18th century, the notion that Shakespeare is England’s national poet was gathering influence, and that began to have an
impact on the theatre as well, with actors paying lip service to the idea of being true to the originals. But it’s not actually until the later 19th and
especially the early 20th century that there’s a serious theatrical movement to stage the plays exactly as they were written, and even attempt to
perform them as they might have looked in Shakespeare’s day.
The interest in original staging practices remains alive now – the reconstructed Globe theatre in London is the most famous instance. But the
imperative to be true to the text has had a much deeper, pervasive influence in the English speaking world. Both the Stratford Festival and the
Royal Shakespeare Company in England are indebted to this paradigm of being faithful to Shakespeare. For example, there are now traditions
of vocal training that supposedly enhance your ability to turn your body into a vessel for Shakespeare’s language. You become a conduit.
There’s a sense of serving the text, of submitting yourself to the words.
Are you in favour of this approach?
If you’re simply being faithful to a text that’s 400 years old, you’re committing yourself to all sorts of outdated ideas and to a language that’s no
longer ours. There’s an argument that this somehow doesn’t matter, that the words will transcend time and speak to you anyway.
But what happens when you see a Shakespeare play on stage? There are certain things that look like they have “endured” but actually have
nothing to do with Shakespeare at all. What’s the conventional way of costuming a Shakespeare play, for example? It’s quasi-19th-century. If
you go see an Othello that’s classically costumed, not in modern dress, that normally means that they wear some sort of fancy made up 19th-
century uniform. But that has nothing to do with Shakespeare. As we know from the handful of illustrations of stage plays from his time, they
were quite comfortable performing a play set, say, in ancient Rome with a couple of people wearing togas and the rest of the cast dressed in
normal Elizabethan dress. In some ways a modern dress performance is actually being more true to Shakespeare than the entirely
conventional 19th-century dress that now to us signals that we’re seeing a Shakespeare play, because deliberate anachronism is one of the
hallmarks of his dramaturgy (whereas the conventional “historical” costumes set the play safely in the past).
The other problem – and it’s also a strength – is that the now traditional approach has turned Shakespeare into a commodity that needs to be
preserved and protected. He is now a kind of brand. Of course that’s one of the things that has guaranteed his endurance in the theatre. For at
least 100 years now Shakespeare has been the playwright. But it has almost nothing to do with where Shakespeare came from.
In a way we’re being more true to Shakespeare if we go see “10 Things I Hate About You” or “She’s the Man” or other Hollywood adaptations of
the plays. I think that’s what Shakespeare would have expected. Because he wasn’t just a playwright, but also an actor and one of the owners
of the acting company that performed most of his plays, he had more control over his material than most writers, but it’s fairly clear that staging
decisions would still have been mainly determined by what people wanted to see. Popular appeal, not aesthetic considerations were key. So
the worshipful attitude toward Shakespeare that theatre professionals often have now is in some ways a 19th-century attitude rather than a
16th- or 17th-century one. I understand where it comes from but it means that what endures has nothing to do with what we might reconstruct
as Shakespeare’s expectations for his plays.
The problem with the worshipful approach to Shakespeare is that if you think that in order to be faithful to Shakespeare you have to be faithful
to the text itself or what you take the text itself to be, you risk a turning the plays into museum exhibits. That’s a way of conserving. And I don’t
think that’s what theatre should do. The job of the theatre is to make things alive and new every time you perform them, and not just by creating
spectacular sets or interestingly choreographed scenes around the unchangeable words. So there’s a burden that comes with Shakespeare
now. If you try something different in a major commercial theatre or in the context of a major Shakespearean company, you can upset a lot of
people. Audience expectations are too clearly defined. And in contemporary commercial theatre, the need to break even carries too much
weight to allow for experimentation with things that are guaranteed money makers—i.e., Shakespeare.
You mentioned some movies. What are your thoughts about Shakespeare on film?
Shakespeare’s stage popularity – if that’s the right word – has a lot to do with not challenging audiences. But on film, you can do things with
Shakespeare that are genuinely popular precisely because they break with convention, like the Baz Luhrmann film version of Romeo and Juliet
with Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio. But that sort of thing doesn’t appeal to the people who would normally go see a Shakespeare play.
Many reviews of the film at the time made the point of how poor the verse was, noted that DiCaprio can’t really speak blank verse. To me, that
was the least important thing about the production. Yes, it’s true that the verse speaking wasn’t that great, but that’s because they said the lines
as though they weren’t lines. It depends what kind of performance tradition you view this through. The whole notion of speaking verse
beautifully is connected to a style of performance that has something to do with presentation. But that’s one particular way of performing
Shakespeare and it’s completely at odds with a more realist approach, where the emphasis is on making the characters believable and on
making us forget that we’re watching actors. The acting in this film, at least as far as Romeo and Juliet are concerned, was naturalistic. The
more naturalistic a performance is the less adept it will be at speaking verse, because no one speaks verse in real life.
As an aside, I’m pretty sure that if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing for Hollywood. We don’t know a lot about him, but we do know
that that he was out to make money. We don’t know of a single play that Shakespeare was interested in publishing as “literature,” or as a
“poem,” the word he might have used. Not a single one of his plays has a dedication or an authorial preface, unlike his short narrative poems.
All the evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote primarily for the stage, with all the relinquishing of textual control that implied. But that made
economic sense: he could make far, far more money staging his plays than by selling them to a publisher.
Whether we’re talking about the Shakespeare brand as it’s usually performed in the theatre or more experimental interpretations,
everyone still seems interested in Shakespeare. Why?
The moment when Shakespeare was writing was the moment that Western civilization as we know it began to come into being. It’s the moment
when Western mercantile society emerges, undergoing a transformation from an older feudal model to a society that’s based increasingly on
economic structures – on money. In picking up on the psychological ramifications and the anxieties provoked by this new way of life,
Shakespeare picks up on things that are still with us. More than any other author of his period, he manages to encode that cultural moment in a
way that’s not so historically specific that it has lost its appeal.
Shakespeare also has a habit of constructing his characters and plotlines in a way that includes a kind of strategic opacity – a term coined by
the critic Stephen Greenblatt. There’s a gap where you expect a clear answer. There’s a lack of information. This leaves the responsibility of
constructing characters or making plots work to the director and actors or to the audience. This habit allows Shakespeare’s plays to be “newly
completed” every time they’re read or staged. It’s precisely because he’s hard to pin down that he can be reinvented.
Consider The Tempest. It was written before England was a serious colonial power and yet today the play is often seen (and performed) as a
commentary on colonialism. I think Caliban is one of the most astonishing characters Shakespeare ever wrote. He captures the logic of the
colonized subject perfectly. It’s possible to see him simply as an evil schemer, but you can also see him as displaced and excluded from his
own possessions, a victim of his own good nature. In performance you can choose your interpretation according to your cultural perceptions
because there’s a kind of gap in the play. But with those lacunae comes a need for making choices, at least in performance. The critic can hold
the various options in the balance in a way that an actor can’t. And making choices means putting yourself into a relationship with the text. To
put it in corny terms, you have to make it your own. Simply serving a play like The Tempest just won’t do – the text actually doesn’t tell you who
Caliban is, precisely. That’s a decision the actor has to make. It’s not enough to commit yourself to the text, you actually have to do a kind of
violence to it, reducing its opacity or ambiguity. So to bring this full circle, if performers are encouraged to be too protective of Shakespeare’s
text, they risk ignoring that inherent imperative to make choices. They risk losing precisely the thing that has made these plays work for
centuries as living theatre.
Source E
“Much Ado About Nothing Much”
By Peter Beech
April 14, 2009
www.guardian.co.uk
In my experience, reading or watching Shakespeare is, by turns, baffling, tiring, frustrating and downright
unpleasant. As we trundle towards St George's Day and Shakespeare's birthday next week, I've got a confession
to make which some of you may find upsetting: I'm just not that into him. Shakespeare, that is.
It's been going on for as long as I can remember. At school, I'd struggle to stay engaged despite the curriculum's
attempts to stay "with it" (Radio Elsinore, anyone?). I went to a university where they actually told us that
"reading Shakespeare is the best thing you can possibly do." It was a bit like the “Emperor's New Clothes” – I
didn't want to seem unrefined, so I never spoke up about the fact that I could see Shakespeare's bollocks
swinging in the breeze. I even did an MA in Shakespearean Studies, just to check. Now I no longer regard
myself as the source of the problem.
In my experience, reading or watching Shakespeare is, by turns, baffling, tiring, frustrating and downright
unpleasant. It does not, as some repeatedly claim, offer unparalleled insight into universal human truths (most
"universal" things, when scrutinized, turn out to be specific to a dominant class anyway). Don't get me wrong,
Shakespeare's writing isn't exactly torture – it doesn't possess the sheer, purgatorial dullness of a Faerie Queene
or a Finnegans Wake – but it is out of date, out of touch, and we read him, I'm convinced, out of habit. Yes, we
need to talk about William. Our continued creative and moral over-reliance on his plays is, at best,
unimaginative and, at worst, dangerous. But I can see you're getting angry. Let me explain.
Shakespeare's inflated modern reputation is the work of a few good men. Well-regarded in the 150 years
following his death, it wasn't until 1769's Shakespeare Jubilee that David Garrick turned the dial from "good
writer" to "god" (and simultaneously kickstarted the Stratford tourist treadmill). In the late 18th century,
coddled anti-establishment Romantics patronised the tale of the rural boy-genius, before a Darwin-led assault
on the Church forced the Victorian upper classes to cast around for another way to control (sorry, civilise) the
masses. Shakespeare was elected to the executive board of English Literature, the new academic subject devised
to do just that.
So far, so dubious, but we could forgive the taint of social engineering if Shakespeare's relevance were not in
doubt. Alas, it is. An index of a literary text's currency is its comedy, and this is one area in which Shakespeare
has aged very badly. Ever been to a rendition of King Lear or Love's Labour's Lost only to watch a nervous cast
elbow their way through 10 minutes of tedious wordplay in front of a baffled crowd? Consider this exchange in
As You Like It:
Rosalind: Where learned you that oath, fool?
Touchstone: Of a certain knight that swore 'by his honour' they were good pancakes, and swore 'by his honour'
that mustard was naught. Now I'll stand to it the pancakes were naught and the mustard was good, and yet was
not the knight forsworn.
Rosalind: How prove you that in the great heap of your knowledge?
Touchstone: … No more was this knight, swearing by his honour, for he never had any; or if he had, he had
sworn it away before he ever saw those pancakes or that mustard.
Whatever! Humor moves quickly, and it has moved beyond the reach of the vast majority of Shakespearean
drama. Every play, with the remorseless enthusiasm of an office bore, pulls off several references to
"cuckoldry" and a raft of tenuous knob gags. But how long must we continue to feign interest in early modern
synonyms for "cock"? Even our schoolkids are too sophisticated to find that funny.
The plays are out of touch in other, less benign ways. Like an elderly relative, Shakespeare is gently mad and a
bit quaint, until he lets rip with something completely unacceptable. The world was a very different place
during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I & VI, when the persecution of "Papists" (ie Catholics) was the
norm, witches were burned and the treasonous were tortured. Before Romeo and Juliet, the punters warmed up
by watching a bear, chained to a stake, get torn apart by a pack of dogs. Shylock? A “laughing-stock.” This
horrendous caricature originally wore a prosthetic nose and was designed for ridicule as a stock villain. Two
years ago, I experienced an eerily "authentic" return to a pre-PC, pre-Holocaust era when an audience at the
reconstructed Globe actually cheered the character's downfall. A scary response, but hardly less than the action
demanded.
Racial and religious minorities aren't the only ones still chained to the stake. To watch Shakespeare is to peer
into a Britain where women are almost completely disempowered. At the close of a happy Shakespeare play,
the female characters are auctioned off to anyone who expresses an interest (in the sad ones, they all die). In
Much Ado About Nothing, Hero takes back her fiancé despite having to fake her own death in order to thwart
his jealous rage. The Taming of the Shrew, in which gutsy Kate capitulates to a form of mental abuse, is plainly
the work of a woman-hater – and yet, season after season, it goes out to audiences. If even reading such a play
is a waste of time, asking talented female actors to abase themselves before the violent misogyny of a former
age is much, much worse.
But then, women in British theatre have to play a peculiar kind of numbers game. Lead actors climb the
Hamlet-to-Lear ladder of beefy, stage-hogging roles; wing-men triumph quietly as canny valets or fiendish
arch-nemeses. If you're a girl, you've got star-struck Juliet, dim Miranda, insipid Desdemona, and then (bam!)
you're Cleopatra – pining, past it, holding out for a hero. All of Shakespeare's major female characters are
gruesomely reliant on male attention. And if you aren't a leading lady, start practising your deferential maid.
The average Shakespearean play has only three roles for women; the majority have very few lines.
So why do people still cheer for Shakespeare? In a word, indoctrination. It begins in our places of learning and
continues in adulthood through an aggressive circulation of consensus. People who have never even seen a
Shakespeare play come up to me and repeat, parrot-fashion, the anecdote of his pre-eminence. He is the only
writer who must be present on every British curriculum – a situation which, to anyone feeling a bit liberal or
radical, should be somewhat frightening. To besmirch his name elicits anything from polite harrumphs to
outright evangelism, as Bidisha discovered recently when she dared to question Othello's racial politics. Tolstoy
tried his hand and was slaughtered by Orwell – a writer who, for all his many accomplishments, was a little too
fond of policing Englishness.
Shakespeare is out of his depth in a world which is looking forward to sexual and racial equality (and to some
new jokes). He cannot be a beacon for the future, because he belongs in the past. There, I've said it. Now can we
please let someone else take the stage?
• Peter Beech is a graduate of King's College London's MA in Shakespearean Studies.