“‘A department of English,’ he said, ‘cannot exist without requiring, for its majors, at least one semester-long course in the study of Shakespeare. To require any less would be irresponsible; it is a dumbing down.’”
That quotation is from The Shakespeare Requirement, Julia Schumacher’s novel about the lives of college professors.
This is Schumacher’s second novel in a trilogy; one of my former students gave me a copy of it. In one of life’s odd coincidences, another student once gave me the first novel in Schumacher’s trilogy, Dear Committee Members. Apparently I must somehow give off the vibe to my students that I would appreciate snarky satirical accounts of the faculty and administrators at a college. Go figure.
The quick review of the novel: it’s amusing, but not as funny as the first one. Well worth reading if you like books that really show that it is impossible to write a parody of a college, because reality is always more absurd than the events in the novel which were created to be outrageously absurd. (You can, by the way, easily read the second novel in this trilogy without reading the first.)
It’s not the novel itself, though, that is inducing ruminations. It is the idea of a Shakespeare requirement.
First, let’s be absolutely clear that Shakespeare is the GOAT. As T.S. Eliot said, “Shakespeare and Dante divide the world between them. There is no third.” (Eliot is the third, but he could hardly say that about himself.) Nonetheless, Shakespeare is as good as it gets. If you want to read great literature, you have to read Shakespeare. In order to understand anything written after 1600, you have to read Shakespeare. He is fun to read. He is intellectually stimulating. You can read anything he wrote dozens of times and still learn from it. I really really really do believe that Shakespeare is incredible.
But…what about assigning Shakespeare to students?
At the collegiate level, a Shakespeare requirement makes enormous sense. It is depressing to imagine talking with someone who majored in English in college, but does not know Shakespeare well. It would be like meeting an economist who skipped supply and demand graphs or an astronomer who didn’t bother leaning about stars. If you major in English in college, you really should need to read and study Shakespeare.
It’s the earlier levels of education that are disturbing me. Until I started thinking about requiring Shakespeare in the wake of reading Schumacher’s book, I was firmly in the “Obviously any decent high school education includes Shakespeare” camp.
I am having second thoughts. I would be quite pleased, by the way, if you, Dear Reader would convince me that I should not be having second thoughts.
Here is where I am getting stuck. Since I regularly teach students who are graduating from high school, I have been getting increasingly alarmed in recent years. (Covid has only amplified this trend.) Many high school graduates, even those attending college, can’t read. Well, technically, they can read in the sense of knowing how to move the eye across the page and recognize English words. But, they cannot read in the sense of engaging in the physical act of reading and having comprehension of what they just read. They cannot sit down with a book, any book, for 30 minutes and just read it. Particularly because they tend to read on electronic devices, their attention wanders away long before they have finished reading a chapter, let alone a whole play.
Many people have noted this decline in the ability to read among the graduates of the nation’s high schools. It is a real problem. I have no idea how to solve that problem, and I have yet to see anyone offer a viable solution that does not require intensive one-on-one teaching. (Homeschoolers, in other words, probably have an easier time solving this problem…but even there, the problem is increasing.)
So, here is the question which is gnawing at me. Imagine a 16 year old who would have an impossible time sitting down to read Austen or Dickens or Hemingway or any of the myriad of other writers of English prose who present no real structural problems for reading. Their prose is fluid; the stories are great. But, imagine a student who can’t keep enough attention to read with comprehension novels like Pride and Prejudice or Oliver Twist or The Old Man and the Sea. Now give that 16 year old student a copy of Hamlet. What happens?
The idea of assigning Shakespeare hinges on the presupposition that the students know how to read well. But, if students graduating from high school and going off to reasonably select liberal arts colleges cannot read well, then does it make sense to assume they can read Shakespeare?
Then, as I thought about it, the problem got even worse. The whole point of assigning Shakespeare is to show students how amazing he is, how he opens up whole vistas on the world. Shakespeare is one of those authors who will linger with you for your whole life, constantly teaching you. But, if your first experience with Shakespeare is simple torture because you are incapable of reading him, then will you ever pick up a copy of a Shakespeare play again?
I meet people like this all the time. They read Shakespeare in high school and hated reading Shakespeare in high school and so they have never been tempted even once in their life to read Shakespeare again. Imagine you had a room full of 16 years olds and you knew in advance that every single one of them would have that experience, would you still assign Macbeth? To what end?
In other words, as I have been thinking about it, I am no longer convinced there is a value added in making high school students (let alone junior high students) read Shakespeare before they have learned to read other Great Books. If I was designing a curriculum for a high school English class now, there is a whole set of authors I would assign long before we even thought about reading Shakespeare. If you have to teach students how to read, then surely you have to start with Great Books which are not written in Elizabethan verse.
As I contemplated junking the Shakespeare requirement in high school, however, a chill went down my spine. I imagined replacing Shakespeare with more Fitzgerald, Ellison, Poe, Steinbeck, or George Eliot—a reading list of Great Books slowly showing how amazing it is to read these deep works. But, then I remembered that these other authors are no longer the staples of a high school curriculum. Instead, the preference these days is books written in the last few years.
The Shakespeare requirement, in other words, is standing in for a requirement to read something written in another era, something that has stood the test of time. By setting up Shakespeare as an immovable idol, schools are still requiring that at least once students will be exposed to a book that is larger than our modern fixations. Remove Shakespeare and he isn’t necessarily replaced by something Great. He may be replaced by the latest trendy novel. Once the Shakespeare requirement goes, does anything written more than a couple decades ago still get assigned?
So, what do we do about the Shakespeare requirement? Should he still be assigned in schools? I am truly stuck on this question.
But here is one thing I know. If you, Dear Reader, are thinking that we should not get rid of the Shakespeare requirement, then ask yourself which Shakespeare play you most recently read for pleasure and how long ago that was. (For me: Henry VI, part 2, last week.) Shakespeare really is amazing, and instead of worrying about whether he should be required reading in high school, perhaps I should spend more time reading him and talking about how amazing he is.
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