Should Shakespeare retain his hallowed place in our curriculum?
”MARRY, before he fell down, when he perceived the common herd was glad he refused the crown, he plucked me ope his doublet and offered them his throat to cut.”
Pardon, Shakespeare? Did someone who’s getting married fall down among the cows? What exactly is going on?
This extract from Julius Caesar is an example of why Shakespeare’s works inspire such controversy, taught as they are as school setwork books.
Usual justifications of why he should continue to retain the hallowed spot that he does in our curriculum are that Shakespeare’s works deal with ”universal themes”, demonstrate a wizardry of storytelling and characterisation, and that his works had a massive influence on forms of poetry and plays. Besides which, his writing is a very powerful lesson on the history of English and how languages change through time. But many of these argument are not that watertight — African poets and playwrights exist who also deal with ”universal themes” and give good models for the form of their art. After all, the arguments against Shakespeare are substantial: as South Africans, shouldn’t we be building a canon of home-grown literature that reflects our own history, linguistic expressions and values?
English teachers who swear by Shakespeare, but then express outrage that their students don’t have a clue about apartheid, should perhaps consider the value of stories that illustrate South African history.
A second persuasive argument against Shakespeare is that of the language. In a country where English is just one of many that are spoken, there are significant numbers of students to whom the language is not their mother tongue. The value of burdening English second language students with the near-foreign language of Elizabethan English is highly debatable. For example, who would know without a glossary that a ”doublet” was a type of shirt worn in those days –and who besides a Shakespeare junkie really cares?
But there still is much to be said about the power of Shakespeare’s words, and how they continue to live on even today. Although a good deal of the language can be considered ”dead”, there is a remarkable amount of Shakespearean language that is spoken by us 21st-century citizens on a daily basis.
If you are ”eaten out of house and home” every Christmas by your relatives, and wish you could ”send them packing” — well, you’re quoting Shakespeare.
Shakespeare also had a way with insults: ”the devil incarnate”, ”bloody-minded” and ”blinking idiot” are all expressions we know courtesy of the Bard, penned some 400 years ago. Same for more commonplace sayings like ”fair play”, ”heart of gold”, and ”vanished into thin air”, which all have their origins in Shakespeare.
So, even though parts of his works might be meaningless to our modern selves (except to those who want to specialise in his works), Shakespeare undeniably lives on in our daily conversations.
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, February 3, 2000.
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