Sunday, December 26, 2010
A couple of days ago I wrote about the difficulty of finding the tone appropriate for writing about Shakespeare. Another question that his commentators have to ask themselves is this: What exactly am I trying to learn through the study of his works? I've mentioned before, several times, that I have no time for the authorship "controversy", not only because there isn't one, but also because it's a dead end. From our perspective, the most important thing should not be "righting" the past. Rather it's the future that's at stake. Wasting time and energy on futile pursuits (including some misguided critical approaches in use in universities today) moves us away from the point: Shakespeare should be studied by every young person in the world. Anything that doesn't contribute to making this happen is a mistake.
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I agree wholeheartedly with your final statement. I believe students should read Shakespeare at every level. I do, however, want students to be given a full historical perspective on the texts, though. They perceive the historical truths of the texts, whether we articulate them or not. When a student asks about anti-Semitism in Merchant or racism in Othello or misogyny in Shrew, they are asking about what they know to have been true for Shakespeare, not just what they know to be true for themselves. We owe it to them to acknowledge the history that bleeds from the page.
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