What Would Shakespeare Say?

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Kembali Di Blog Kesayangan Anda
bandar cemeI got in trouble with some parents one time for pointing out that Shakespeare’s plays were full of sex and violence. I said that I thought it was interesting that we make a big deal about all the sex and violence on TV while Shakespeare’s works are venerated as the highest literature. This ended up with a dad yelling at me, “Did you tell my daughter that Shakespeare’s plays were like reading porn?!” Clearly my words got a little exaggerated in transmission.

But think about the sexy lines in Romeo and Juliet or the comedies, the cross-dressing actors, the hyperbolic violence of the tragedies and histories, or the orange girls selling rum-soaked oranges to the groundlings. In fact, the Puritans shut down the Globe for licentiousness, and yet the plays that graced its stage are considered our highest literature.

I’ve had a few conversations lately that have made me think about the distinctions we make between fiction and literature, high and low art, or even among types of writing performed by teachers and students every day.

I’ve been interviewing candidates for the summer institute. One of the requirements for the institute is that the teachers compile a portfolio of original writing. So one of the questions I have asked is what kind of writing do the teachers think they will work on. This question always causes angst, and every year several teachers admit that they have a secret desire to write a novel. This year I got a couple of variations on this theme. One teacher admitted she desperately wanted to write chick lit and another that she wanted to write telenovela episodes. I think both women were waiting for me to frown discouragingly like some stereotypical movie professor, complete with tweed jacket and elbow patches.

Later I had a conversation with a student that was remarkably similar. She is writing her term paper on creative writing and the importance of its inclusion in English curricula. And like her soon-to-be colleagues, she was feeling guilt over the fact that she wanted to ask her students to write poetry. Considering Shakespeare’s sonnets, she asked if I thought it would be odd if, instead of asking her students to write an essay which analyzes Shakespeare’s relationship to his mysterious dark love, she were to ask her students to write a sonnet to someone they admired from afar. I told her I loved the idea. From a critical standpoint, what better way to learn the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet than to write one, and what better way to understand an apostrophe than to construct one? Critical skills aside, I said, the ability to write a good love poem is arguably a more useful life skill than the ability to analyze one.

But we never teach this way, do we?

English is always defended as a practical skill—everyone needs to be able to read and write, so get an English degree and then go to business school. The ability to write well will undoubtedly help you to make money! Or what gets emphasized are some of the most esoteric aspects of the field, like literary analysis. I write literary analysis, but since only 1% of the adult population of the US has a PhD, and only a fraction of that fraction are English PhDs, and even a smaller fraction of those are professors at research universities, that skill can’t get any more specialized.

Is that all English is, a nuts and bolts skill that will enhance more lucrative professions or a highly specialized skill used by only a fraction of a fraction of the population?

I was at an interdepartmental committee meeting with one of my colleagues from the English department, and we were asked questions about the practical uses of our fields outside of academia, and the other English professor got very exasperated and said, “None of this discussion is relevant to what I do! English is the largest discipline in the Humanities because it is the most important, and it is called the Humanities for a reason. I teach young men and women how to be human!” I wanted to applaud. I should have. Isn’t this what all narrative is, from oral stories like those codified in the Iliad and Odyssey, to the Gospels, Chaucer’s tales and Shakespeare’s plays, to stories and novels, movies, and TV shows? We listen to and tell stories to learn about the human experience and to thereby gain some insight into its mysteries. But try making that argument to the Board of Finance!

Sometimes we, and even the authors we love, are our own worst enemies in making such an argument. Nathaniel Hawthorne infamously railed against the “mob of scribbling women” that were producing popular fiction. William Faulkner was once told that his novels were too difficult for the average reader, and that many undergraduates would complain that they did not understand his prose even after three readings. Asked for a comment, Faulkner replied, “Try four.” But for every author who defends so-called high art, there are those like Norman Mailer who once defended TV sitcoms as just a modern form of story telling, and the only thing he protested were commercial interruptions because they break the narrative line. Faulkner himself wrote more than fifty movie screenplays, including those for To Have and To Have Not and The Long Hot Summer, which were the first films to bring together Bogart and Bacall and Newman and Woodward, respectively. Former UConn English Professor Scott Bradfield once offered a graduate seminar titled “Lit and Shit: What We Read and What We’re Supposed to Read.” And of course there’s Mark Twain’s observation that “a classic is a book that everyone praises and no one reads.”

So absolve yourself of guilt this weekend when you watch reruns of Law and Order or rent a romantic comedy, and don’t feel like you have to shut your door and draw the shades when you ask your students to write that love poem.