Primrose Road

Why we teach Shakespeare: because he's not full of cliches, because his plays don't follow anything resembling Freytag's Pyramid, and because half the time, what happens just doesn't make sense. Hamlet stabs the guy behind the curtain even though he just saw Uncle Dad praying down the hall. Everyone Caesar ever met stabs him and all he can ask -- when he's inexplicably still alive -- is "et tu, Brute?". Cressida goes back home. Hermione is magically resurrected and no one ever asks if it's possible to bring her son back to life too. Valentine says, "ok, take her, she's yours, it's better we should stay friends." Life for most people doesn't work via action-reaction, cause-effect, motivation, or "if you just try harder ..." and neither does Shakespeare.

When Mary Janell Metzger spent a month observing a high school Advanced Placement class, she found that the course's standardization exerted "a pressure that at once excludes ambiguity and reflection and encourages vague generalities" (24). This is what my 'best' students have come to me with: vague generalities. The students Metzger observed, college bound and at the top of their graduating class, read in Shakespeare meaningless self-esteem driven cliches like "imagination is important" and "follow your dreams."

Sure, she concedes, Shakespeare's work encourages students to develop "imagination." But so much more importantly, they call for "a daring capacity to entertain ambiguity and the paradoxes of human life and history" (24). And Shakespeare sure is a great way of teaching them that human history is damn ambiguous.

(At the same time, maybe happiness on a personal level is being in a place where you are able to believe that your life is entirely unparadoxical, explainable, and simultaneously dependent on moments of character-driven motivation and miracles.)

....

Works Cited:

Metzger, Mary Janell. "The villainy you teach me ...": Shakespeare and AP English literature. The English Journal. 92:1 (2002): 22-28.