From: gerard@caliban.soest.hawaii.edu (Gerard Fryer)
Subject: Re: Enforced Shakespeare?
Organization: Scum Of the Earth and Senile Tenured
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 19:42:11 GMT

I suppose everyone who has ever experienced Shakespeare (which is every
one of us) wants to stick his 2 cents in.  Here's mine.

Shakespeare, as the educational system would have it (Malaysia, early
sixties) was meant to be introduced to me in 3rd form.  Fortunately I
bought my books early and read Macbeth cover to cover in an afternoon
(never mind about what you don't understand, just plough right on
through).  What actually followed in school was excruciating, but it
didn't kill Shakespeare for me.  I proceeded to read essays on clothing
imagery, the knocking on the door, all that stuff, and by 16 I was
gobbling up Shakespeare plays at the rate of one a week (see my
workstation address for the lingering influences).  But that was all
despite school, not because of it.

Since the plays themselves are such good entertainment, surely there
has to be a way to use them to excite an interest in literature?  All
it should take is enthusiastic teachers, but those, alas, seem to be
in short supply.  Isn't this sort of problem precisely what multimedia
education was designed to answer?  It seems to me that with Henry V on
videodisk and the script on CD/ROM even a mediocre instructor could
make blood seem to drip from the walls and reduce any students with
only a passing knowledge of Shakespeare to a mixture of terror and
fascination.  People would be fighting their way into class.  And once
you have them hooked, the necessary descent into clause analysis,
Elizabethan history, and figures of speech would be seen for what they
are: ways to get into the plays and enhance their enjoyment of them
(and improve your use of language on the way).

My enthusiasm for Shakespeare was temporarily tempered by a succession
of strong-willed women graduate students, but has returned unabated.  I
had wanted to name our new multi-processor Sun "prospero" but that was
nixed because Will S. was a blatant misogynist.  But even in our
more-P.C. world there's a place for Shakespeare.  He was, after all,
the product of his culture and that culture has profoundly influenced
ours.  To figure our where we are going, or even where we want to go,
you have to know where we have been.  The work of dead white European
males demands inspection if only to understand its influence on us, and
high art has to be appreciated regardless of where it comes from.  So
how should literature be taught now?  Judge it for the period in which
it was written, then consider how it might have changed to suit the
modern world.  I would love to hear that some enterprising English lit
teacher in high school presents the Taming of the Shrew by comparing it
to one of its modern interpretations: that episode of "Moonlighting"
from a few years ago.  But that's really the rub: there are few
enterprising teachers.

Hmm... I hadn't intended to subject the net to verbal diarrhoea.  These
are just the ravings of a soft-money scientist facing proposal
deadlines.  Dismiss them if you wish.
-- 
Gerard Fryer  (g.fryer@soest.hawaii.edu)
School of Ocean & Earth Science & Technology
University of Hawaii at Manoa