The Dearth and Death of Shakespeare

She hated the 1996 Baz Luhrmann Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, whom she claimed could not possibly have understood their lines, and she vowed would never give up the fight for Proper English.

Her unit on Hamlet was legendary throughout the school. Alumnae of her class made it sound like the literary equivalent of a shark-and-cougar infested decathlon beset by tornadoes.

“Wait 'til you do the Hamlet notebook,” they said.

When it was my class’s turn, we bought our paperback Hamlets and small spiral notebooks at the school bookstore and filed nervously to our desks. It turned out we had to read the whole play, an act or two per night, in one week and write summaries of the action and our responses in the notebook.

I also recall memorizing and reciting a monologue, though I got points knocked off for saying “tuh be or not tuh be” instead of “too be or not too be.”

At the time, I couldn’t figure out why everyone was so worked up about the Hamlet assignment (unsurprising for a writer, I know — let’s skip the part about the tutoring I needed in algebra). But despite my teacher’s textual devotion, I didn’t really appreciate the play until I had seen some good stage productions as an adult; even the Kenneth Branagh film didn’t suffice. Now if a director cuts too many lines in the name of keeping the show under 150 minutes, I’m disappointed.

So if I had taken a course in feminist lit instead of Shakespeare for senior year English, would I have turned out differently? (Granted, the closest thing my high school had to secular gender studies was probably a few weeks of abstinence-only “health class” when it was too cold to play tennis.)

Desperately seeking a culprit

Given her reverence for Shakespeare (“the Inimitable Bard”), maybe my English teacher shared David Woods’s horror upon reading the recent Wall Street Journal piece by Heather Mac Donald on the curricular desecrations at UCLA’s English major, which now gives students options like gender or race studies while dropping single-author courses in Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer.

In Slate.com, Rebecca Schuman, herself an English teacher, insists that English’s Great White Triumvirate lives happily on in many other historical lit courses at UCLA and that maybe a class on “Queer Literature since 1855” wouldn’t be so bad — Gertrude Stein, anyone?

Writers like Woods and Mac Donald argue that slipping gender and race studies in among single-author classes on English’s historical greats is to toss The Language onto history’s garbage heap in favor of politically correct diatribes on sexuality, race, and class. Because how could work by non-white, feminist, or queer authors possibly be anything but the vacuous, self-centered rants of victimhood?

Woods writes that Shakespeare’s “immortal works” are losing ground to “subjects such as gay and lesbian studies, women of color in the U.S., and feminist and queer theory” — none of which, the implication goes, have any lasting importance to American literature (at least compared to a few long-dead Europeans who were writing centuries before the Declaration of Independence was signed).

He adds that poor ol’ Shakespeare may still be hanging on, “albeit with such addenda as the role of blacks in his plays, jostling with a course on pornography and the politics of female exploitation.”

“Who’s to blame for this dumbing down?” Woods demands.

A quixotic quest

The blinding irony here is that in a world where scholarship focused on women of color or queer theory is automatically dismissed as dumbed-down addenda to the important stuff, classes that would broaden students’ exposure to alternative worlds are pilloried as unnecessary to building up our culture. Not to mention the implication, in this case as cavalier as it is appalling, that examining the role of black people in Shakespeare's plays is some kind of denigration of the text.

From the apoplexy over Webster’s Third and the much-maligned metastasization of social media, to what Schuman calls “the perfect storm of neoconservative pearl-clutching” over the lost Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer courses, it’s never about the language at all. It’s about any threat to the status quo.

To those blowing the alarms, that little ship on the edge of the waterfall isn’t the English language; it’s a proxy for the world they know.

It took me several years to realize the irony of my English teacher’s dedication to preserving The Language. She revered Shakespeare and tickled us by claiming that she’d leave her husband if Geoffrey Chaucer were still alive (we all had to memorize the Prologue from The Canterbury Tales in its original Middle English). But declaring Shakespeare and Chaucer your idols while railing against shifts in The Language is like saying Miguel de Cervantes is your favorite writer, but you really dislike novels.

Cervantes gave us “quixotic” — who knows what we’ll get next, especially if we open up the university canon?

Since the Gutenberg press, people have been sobbing that their language is on the brink of a precipice. In truth, English itself is a stormy sea that’s been churning since the Norman Conquest, and for good or ill, no diversified English major is going to part the waters (though it will provide sporadic outlets in the press for those terrified of minority voices).

In an online article, the Oxford English Dictionary estimates that, “at the very least,” the English language has 250,000 words in it, and if you add in things like different inflections, technical jargon, and unpublished regionalisms, that number is closer to 750,000 words.

According to a recent Mental Floss round-up, The Bard of Avon himself gave us “addiction,” “bedazzled,” “eyeball,” “manager,” “swagger,” and well over 2,000 others. With such a penchant for linguistic flexibility, surely Shakespeare himself would have wanted to open the doors of our English classrooms.