Shakespeare often comes under criticism for being out of date, difficult to study, and irrelevant to students' own experiences. But it isn't quite time to ditch him yet.
Studying Shakespeare at school is an escapable fact for many of us. (Indeed, in Britain it is a required part of the course for anyone taking English in secondary school.) Teaching the work of this one Renaissance playwright to those without a general knowledge of his contemporaries, sources or even the language he wrote in can seem like a fairly eccentric way of educating young people. It’s no wonder that so many in later life say that they were put off the Bard by drudging line by line through a set text, and then regurgitating a few ideas onto an exam paper.
Leaving aside the issue of whether or not Shakespeare was a transcendent genius, and possibly the greatest playwright who ever lived, is school the right place to teach him? With only limited teaching time, and an increasing emphasis on “relevance”, the obvious solution seems to be to drop this apparently anomalous, if brilliant, Elizabethan and concentrate more time on contemporary fiction or nineteenth-century poetry.
However, there are good arguments for keeping Shakespeare on the curriculum. The insistence on a narrow idea of “relevance” has been criticised by some, including the novelist Zadie Smith, as patronising – it assumes that students can only relate to their own immediate experiences, and are incapable of dealing with the larger emotional and speculative issues to be found in Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet. Why should they be capable of dealing with the parallel worlds of X-Men, Snoop Dogg, Lord of the Rings and The Bourne Identity, but not Shakespeare? Of course Shakespeare can be tricky, and requires a different approach at times (for tips on getting to grips with him, see Studying a Shakespeare Play), but there’s no reason to suppose he is beyond the reach of any student.
And if the time saved from Shakespeare was spent on later English literature, there’s a good chance students would end up running back to Shakespeare for explanations and references. Dickens, Keats, Trollope and Woolf, taking some examples almost at random, all refer to and engage with Shakespeare in different ways. Their work is full of echoes from Shakespeare, resonances which would be inaudible to students who weren’t familiar with Will’s own tone. Like it or not, Shakespeare is interwoven with much of the English literature canon, and disentangling him hastily would surely hinder students instead of helping them.
