His plays harbor problematic depictions and characterizations
The Lorena Germán – Jess Cluess contretemps has nudged my curiosity, so I looked for more.
Way back last July:
Oy. You mean, like Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton? For example?
Fast forward to today and she’s being bullied in the usual fashion.
So how about this DisruptTexts crew of educators?
Here’s Lorena Germán on how (and why) to disrupt Shakespeare.
We knew that suggesting educators disrupt Shakespeare would be a challenge for many. We were pleased to see the openness to the idea and the willingness to engage. But then again, it could be because we’re “preaching to the choir” and we acknowledge that educators hesitant to challenging thinking around the use of Shakespeare in our schools chose not to engage. The chat surfaced some valid points and great thoughts around the reasons for replacing and/or critically interrogating Shakespeare. Here are some of our thoughts around Shakespeare and his pedestal:
We believe in offering students a wide variety of literature and access to playwrights other than Shakespeare. That is valuable, restorative, and productive.
No kidding. Do any schools say Shakespeare and only Shakespeare should be on offer? University students who major in English literature will take one or more Shakespeare course(s), but primary and secondary schools mostly don’t specialize that way.
We believe that Shakespeare, like any other playwright, no more and no less, has literary merit. He is not “universal” in a way that other authors are not. He is not more “timeless” than anyone else.
Nope. Wrong. Wrong in the “no more” part. He does have more “literary merit” than most. You’d have to read him and/or see him on stage/film to see how and why though. It’s not a myth; he really is as good as he’s cracked up to be. This is all the more interesting because he came from such an unremarkable background. He wasn’t an earl or even a knight, he wasn’t rich, he didn’t go to Cambridge or Oxford, he started out as a player (an actor), who had to go on the road when plays were banned in London because of the plague (sound familiar?), which was considered very raffish and low-class indeed.
We believe he was a man of his time and that his plays harbor problematic depictions and characterizations.
That “harbor” is sly – as if he were hiding a fugitive Nazi in his basement. Anyway – Othello? Shylock? They’re not as straightforwardly “problematic” as you’d expect from a 16th century country boy. And then there’s the women question, on which he is startlingly original and different from his rivals.
Overall, we continue to affirm that there is an over-saturation of Shakespeare in our schools and that many teachers continue to unnecessarily place him on a pedestal as a paragon of what all language should be. Though we enjoy reading some of the plots in his plays and acknowledge the depth and complexity within many of his plot arcs and characters, we also find that educators are often taught to see Shakespearean plays as near perfection, his characters as “archetypes”, and to persist in oj indoctrinating students into a false notion of the primacy (and superiority) of the English language.
Oh we enjoy some of his plots; how generous. That passage is illiterate and stupid, and this group should not be allowed anywhere near any curriculum decisions.
We do not see these same problematic approaches in other plays where whiteness and the male voice are not centered…So, let us be honest, the conversation really isn’t about universality, nor and this isn’t about being equipped to identify all possible cultural references. This is about an ingrained and internalized elevation of Shakespeare in a way that excludes other voices. This is about white supremacy and colonization.
I’m not persuaded. You know why? Her words are not up to the job. Language is a vital tool for persuasion, in fact it’s pretty much impossible to persuade without it, unless you consider a fist under the nose “persuasion.” Exposure to rich, complicated language just might be a path to important fields of learning and work.
“indoctrinating students into a false notion of the primacy (and superiority) of the English language”
This is just unfounded slander. We don’t teach Shakespeare to impose anything, we teach it to better understand the history of literature. That’s why ancient Greek and Roman literature and plays are studied as well, and much else.
Let’s see, what playwrights was I assigned to read? Shakespeare. Shakespeare. Shakespeare. Shakespeare.
Just kidding. I did read Shakespeare; any playwright who doesn’t should be ashamed of themselves. But the list I was assigned included Aphra Ben, Lillian Helmann, Marsha Norman, Suzan-Lori Parks, Lorraine Hansberry, Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, Gertrude Stein, Susan Glaspell, Sarah Ruhl…the list continues.
As for non-white males? Well, I read August Wilson, James Baldwin, and many others.
I also read many plays by gay and/or lesbian authors (Angels in America, Learning to Drive, etc). These actually were quite scarce in the period before about the 1970s, though many of the early plays were written by gay playwrights. But women writers were not unknown before Rowling. That’s just plain ludicrous. That shows an inability to process information that is readily available to anyone with an internet connection.
And she is a crap writer; those sentences are just…ouch. No wonder she hates Shakespeare. This man without advanced education wrote much better than she does. It’s jealousy. (Okay, I’m jealous of Shakespeare, too, but I would never seek to ban him for that reason, only admire him.)
I studied Shakespeare.
Boring!
The plays are all just stuffed full of quotations.
/sarc
So many of the common phrases, and quite a few words, we use daily come from the pen of Bill. Those who are unaware of The Bard’s work are unaware of the origins of them. And they are the poorer for it.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Lorena,
Than are stored on your bookshelf.
The lesson to be learned from this is that no amount of appeasement is enough for these people. Cluess apologized for something she really shouldn’t have, and said pretty much all the things you’re “supposed” to say in such an apology, and yet here a month later some officious twit is demanding that she supplicate herself further by reciting what she has learned.
One reason I have confidence that these assholes aren’t going to win in the end is that they’re so utterly shitty at persuasion. They can browbeat some people into silence, but they’re not winning hearts or minds.
And oh, does that bother some people, who concoct elaborate theories about how the plays must REALLY have been written by the Earl of Oxford or some other nobleman, because the son of a glover couldn’t possibly have known stuff about history or writing.
Yup. I really loathe the “Shakespeare was Oxford/Essex/Elizabeth” thing. Sheer snobbery.
It’s very true that it’s a puzzle where the hell Shakespeare got all that, but “by being born into the aristocracy” is SO not the answer.
OB:
Oh, I dunno. The Bard could have lurked behind the odd baronial arras, and had himself a fair helping of the difference between what people want to have others believe about them, and what they let slip that they really are..
Neo-bowlderisation. George Orwell’s Clergyman’s Daughter had the ignorant Philistines complaining about Shakespeare because of Lady Macbeth’s using words like “womb”.
“Though we enjoy reading some of the plots in his plays and acknowledge the depth and complexity within many of his plot arcs and characters,”
What about the poetry, the language, you tin-eared oaf?
Re Shakespeare the writer – the prolific Bernard Cornwell’s Fools and Mortals is a fun historical novel. The protagonist is Richard Shakespeare, WS’s younger actor brother, and the great man himself is a canny theatre manager, with an eye to profits and pleasing the audience, and knocks up plays to order. WS is fairly unkind to his younger brother, who is mightily fed up with always playing women. WS promises to write him a man’s part next time, and so very meanly gives him the part of Francis Flute in a Midsummer’s Night Dream.
KB Player, I just checked my to read list; I do already have that book. I may have to find a way to maneuver it further up the list.
@iknlast It’s an entertaining light read. Cornwell normally has a warrior/soldier protagonist who fights a lot of battles, with muskets/shield walls/longbows, depending on the period. This is something of a departure for him, though in Elizabethan times men did get into brawls and have to be handy with swords.
Oh, Jesus wept! What an absolute cacophony of bollocks these people spout, revealing nought but their own intellectual deficit.
mx ingrid, the ‘Magpie Librarian’, is just a prick in a shockingly bad wig, ridiculously over-sized spectacles that were out-dated before he was born, and a blouse straight from Grandma’s closet. mx ingrid is also unaware that ‘woman’ is not the plural form of ‘woman’, or that ‘mx’ does not make his sex at all ambiguous, the pathetic little specimen.
Now, I am not a big fan of Shakespeare in general but nonetheless I can and do recognise and appreciate the sheer talent of the man and completely understand why his work is still so influential and so popular. For a Warwickshire lad he could certainly turn a well-honed phrase. Loreta German, on the other hand, is apparently unaware that almost nothing written in the last 400 years has been truly original: look closely and the plotlines of every story can be found either in Shakespeare or the Bible.
@KBPlayer #7:
Thanks for the recommendation… I’ve been enjoying his Sharpe series and it’d be interesting to see what else he can write.
Well, I admire Shakespeare hugely, but must say that I have, over the long years, been not so fond of some of his admirers (Prince Charles, for one, and a number of others who suppose that it is a patriotic duty to like Shakespeare), and should certainly like to see more productions of good contemporaries of Shakespeare like Marlowe, Jonson & Middleton, as well as of Restoration theatre, which seems to have vanished from the stage, instead of endless new productions of plays by Shakespeare, plays that I have seen umpteen times before.
Oh, that Earl of Oxford business! Has anyone who supports the ‘Oxford’ candidate actually read any of his stuff? Or the Christopher Marlowe business – CM faked his death and fled to Italy where he wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays and sent them back to England for performance. I love Marlowe. ‘Tamburlaine’ is ‘Ubu Roi’ 300 years before its time. ‘The Jew of Malta’ is a quite extraordinary black farce – I remember seeing it years ago in Oxford, with Ian MacDiarmid playing Barabbas. The nice, well brought-up bourgeois audience, anxious for a bit of culture with a capital ‘K’, sat aghast as anti-Christian jokes poured forth from the stage. The only decent people in the ;play are the Turks! I was almost having hysterics, not only because of the jokes, but because of the audience sitting there shocked and turning to look at their neighbours as though to ask, ‘Are we supposed to laugh at this?’ How could Marlowe get away with this, I thought. But of course he didn’t in the end.
Shakespeare & Marlowe are hugely different in approach and sensibility, and this applies, too, to the way they build their verse. Which does not stop the cranks who infest the British Marlowe Society (the American one is far better) from banging on about Marlowe’s escape to Italy – they even persuaded Westminster Abbey, when an inscription to Marlowe was engraved on a window in Poets’ Corner, to give his dates as ‘1564-?’ They tell, or used to tell, people who wanted to join the society that members were expected to be ‘open-minded’ – which would be better put as ‘gullible fools’.
Mark Twain left school at 12, Dickens worked in a blacking factory, Edward Bond, one of the finest recent British playwrights, left school at 14, Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker (but got to Cambridge, where he would have been inculcated in Calvinist theology, which accounts, I suspect, for his critical approach to Christianity and religion in general).
There have been very few good poets who have sprung from the aristocracy – Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney & Fulke Greville come to mind. The ‘anti-Stratfordians’ are driven in the main by that most pernicious of vices: snobbery.
So here’s the thing: In their minds, you’re wrong by definition here. Like, I think they do really believe this part:
They believe it not as an a posteriori judgement. They believe it as an a priori truth. No one has more merit than anyone else because no one can have more merit than anyone else, and this truth precedes any investigation of the world.
‘universal’; ‘timeless’: I confess that when I hear these words out of the mouths of sentimentalists on the one hand and disruptors on the other, I feel nauseous. The sentimentalists, because they regard the arts as quasi-religious, up above it all in some pure aesthetic space, and the disruptors because of their arrogant opinion that, living later, they are therefore morally better, more knowledgeable, and in the happy position of being able to condescend to people of the past, who were stuck in their times – in the case of Shakespeare in something called ‘The Elizabethan World Picture’ and a politics that has no relevance to our times, whereas we, particularly if we are New Historicists, feel we live in some happy Fukuyama-esque haven that is outside history.
Shakespeare actually thought seriously about history and politics, and didn’t use his plays for sloganeering. He makes you, or some of us at least, think.
What a poisonous little person Lorena German is, and how craven are Jess Cluess’s publishers and agent.
I have no idea what that first tweet is trying to allege. A plain reading of the text is so obviously bollocks that I have to think she means something more subtle, but I can’t see it. So. Is it just a silly tweet?
And then Lorena German…!
This line alone destroys the credibility of this ‘throw out Shakespeare’ movement. Criticise Shakespeare if you wish, but this line implies that all playwrights have equal literary merit. And if the author did not mean to imply that, then she has poor facility with English, with rather undermines her assertion I think.
Yes, Holms, their sheer stupidity and arrogance of that sentence. ‘We believe…’ Well, who are you? What reasons do you have for holding the belief you say you do? Are you in any position to judge literary merit? Are you even in a position to make an assertion like that (nonsensical as it is). What is ‘literary merit’ in your view? Some sort of quality that attaches itself indifferently to the work of anyone who sets pen to paper, or finger to key, to write a poem, a play, a short story, a novel, however bad? One could go on, and on…
The museum at Stratford on Avon has a great section on how influences in Shakespeare’s early life appear in the plays–names of plants he’d have been familiar with, etc. It mentions that Shakespeare’s father was a public official, so he’d have been familiar with pomp and ceremony, as well as politics and governance. There’s also ‘Will in the World’, which attempts to ‘reverse engineer’ Shakespeare’s life and influences from what can be gleaned from the plays–the thing I remember most about this book was Greenblatt pointing out that the only healthy companionate marriage in the entire canon was the Macbeths….
And only tangentially relevant, but I found it fascinating–I have a book somewhere about medieval ‘reckoning’, which points out that arithmetic using Arabic numbers was only just coming into use in Shakespeare’s time, and, as a man with his finger on the pulse of contemporary culture, Shakespeare used mathematical metaphors that relied on the audience getting the reference:
‘And yet we should for perpetuity
Go hence in debt. And therefore, like a cipher,
Yet standing in rich place, I multiply
With one “We thank you” many thousands more
That go before it.’
@#11BloodKnight – I enjoyed the Sharpe series and the Last Kingdom series, both books and television, partly because Sean Bean looks very nifty in his green Rifles uniform. He’s not a patch on Patrick O’Brian though for historical novels in a setting of upending wars.
@#12Tim Harris – I haven’t seen the Jew of Malta or Tamburlaine. I have seen Edward II and this does resemble a Shakespeare history play, with power jockeying and courtiers plotting. I would say “a different sensibility” – less nuanced, more black and white in the characters. It’s a very good play though of the turning wheel of power and though I saw it 40 years ago I can still remember bits of it. We could have done with 20 more years of Marlowe. I get exasperated with writers who die untimely – eg Jane Austen.
At the Edinburgh Festival you occasionally get someone putting on the more obscure Elizabethan/Jacobean plays eg Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall.
@#17guest – the display at Stratford sounds interesting. I mourn, when I read Shakespeare, how much closer people were to the natural world, to the names and properties of plants, when children now can’t recognise an acorn.
@18 Have you seen this?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34837005-the-lost-words
I’m not a huge Macfarlane fan, but one of these days I’ll get a copy.
KBPlayer: ‘Edward II’ has a very strong relationship to Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II’ (one of my favourite plays, one that I have directed and acted in as Richard); it is the forerunner to Shakespeare’s play, and an influence on it, just as Marlowe’s poem ‘Hero & Leander’ (a wonderful poem) was a stimulus to Shakespeare to write ‘Venus & Adonis’. In ‘As You Like It’, Shakespeare makes a specific reference to Marlowe and ‘Hero & Leander’ when Phebe says:
Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might,
‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’
The second line is a a line from ‘Hero & Leander’. The dead shepherd is Marlowe.
I suspect the two young men worked together on some of the early history plays, which were not by Shakespeare alone, and in particular on ‘Edward III’, a play that is now recognised as almost certainly being in part by Shakespeare. They clearly stimulated each other. I put on and directed a production of it at the university I worked at in connexion with the British Council’s British arts festival in 1998, I think. It was the first production ever in Japan, and probably only the third or fourth full production for 400 years. The first half is, I believe, definitely by Shakespeare – it contains probably the first of Shakespeare’s great temptation scenes, when Edward attempts to seduce the Countess of Salisbury. In the second half, which is not so intimate and literary (by which I mean no criticism) but works wonderfully well as theatre (it is about the wars in France), there is one speech by Edward which has all the hallmarks of Marlowe, in its building and cutting away at the end almost to a kind of bathos. It was wonderful to work on a play that hadn’t been done thousands of times before.
The play of Marlowe’s I love best is ‘Dr Faustus’ (the first version), with Faustus’s final soliloquy, in which blank verse is used with a quite astonishing mastery, and an hour’s time is convincingly contracted on stage into a speech lasting about ten minutes.
@guest – I mean to read Lost Words at some time. It is really sad how people don’t know the names of common trees and flowers. I picked up a copy of Punch from the 1920s and it was taken for granted that their readers, who were mostly suburban folk, would know herb robert and eglantine. I’ve read a couple of other Macfarlanes and though I do admire him, after a while his constant twitching antennae sensibility gets me down.
@Tim Harris – I’ve not even heard of Edward III. I’m surprised the RSC or the National hasn’t put it on. I catch their broadcasts of live theatre now and then.
And in the past 20 years, I have taught students who could not recognize a dandelion. Sad.
iknklast, just a couple of years ago I had a grown man try to lecture my grandsons and me on the dangers of eating things that grow in the wild. Turns out that he had no idea that the ‘potentially poisonous’ berries we were grazing on were in fact blackberries. Also, a young couple living near to us were surprised to learn that the red things that grew on the tree in their front garden were cherries.
KBPlayer#21
‘Edward III’ has been put on twice by the RSC, as far as I know, once in probably 1999, and once in 2002 at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. The first production seems to have been none too good – there was some sort of row, I have heard, and Edward Hall, Peter Hall’s son, who was the original director, left in a very large and well-equipped huff halfway through rehearsal, amongst other things. I don’t know how that later production was received.
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Before 1995 Yes from the 70’s forward
Lessing and Nin plus Ursala Le Guin and McCarthy ( The Ship that Sang) not to mention Barbara Tuchman just off the top of my head