#anyway thanks cressida-jayoungr

[cto10121]

@cressida-jayoungr replied to your post:

What do you say to those who insist that Shakespeare should not be read, only watched in performance? (I'm ambivalent, but can see their point.)

I’ve heard this too, by my own grad school professor, no less, who specialized in Shakespeare. I’ve always found it to be a specious and even bad faith argument, particularly by those who should know better.

For one thing, Shakespeare’s plays have a long history in print, mostly bootlegged quartos and octavo booklets sold to audiences who most certainly saw the play on stage (in fact, that’s why they bothered to bootleg it in the first place). We assume Elizabethans have the same attitude towards play scripts as we do toward screenplays (i.e. just a plan, meant to be discarded), and indeed, few scripts survive today. But the deeper truth is that play scripts (the popular ones, at least) did get bootlegged and printed and published, and Elizabethans bought and read them, even making collections out of individual quartos and folios. Not to mention they were very carefully guarded by theater companies from rival troupes who would try to steal the scripts and stage their own version for profit.

That’s because a stage performance at its essence is an interpretation of the original script. Even with the author right there bringing their vision to life, it’s still just an interpretation, and of course the collaborative nature of theater makes each staging a fundamentally unique one. We are, I think, confused by film, which is a different medium altogether. Destroy a screenplay, and the movie will live on so long as copies can be made and had. Destroy a play script, the entire play is lost (unless actors who remember the lines can commit it newly to the page).

In the context of literature class, what you’d want as an English teacher is for the students to arrive at their own understanding and interpretation of the text. That can’t happen if you just make the kids watch the film adaptation (out of dozens at that!) and call it a day. This is English class, not Film Studies. You do a disservice both to the art of literature AND film to confuse the two. Also, Zeffirelli’s, Baz Lurhmann’s, Polanski’s, etc. take on Shakespeare, no matter how competent or good, ultimately doesn’t matter—what matters is what the student takes from the original Shakespeare. And that can’t happen if you don’t expose the students to the words on the page first.

But true, play script dialogue often does not easily read well on the page than on the stage; it is meant to be spoken, after all. The only other solution would be simply to delegate the teaching of Shakespeare to drama teachers, not English ones (who are not even trained to teach Shakespeare or any other playwright as performance anyway—and I don’t think they should). That would at least make sense with the claims these people are making—they’re dramas, so the drama teachers should teach them.

But let’s not kid ourselves: If we do that, the average American schoolchild will never learn or even encounter Shakespeare. Modern American theater is economically elitist; the lack of government funding and subsidies had gentrified it to oblivion. Drama is also an elective, not a core subject; the first thing the public school system does to save pennies is precisely to cut the drama department. It would become supremely easy to avoid Shakespeare. Not even the most rabid of anti-art conservatives would want that (they favor a superficial “name-drop” kind of education), and even the ones who despise Shakespeare (all of them) know they will absolutely not get away with not teaching him. So it all comes back to the English teachers, and now even they are not really teaching him.

One more thing. To me, drama is literature—hell, it’s nothing but words, words, words—so it’s completely appropriate for English teachers to teach plays, anyway. In my experience the best plays tend to read well on the page too. In the case of Shakespeare, as a playwright he was very wordy, even within the context of his own time. He even disliked (or at least was extremely lazy) to write stage directions apart from the dialogue, unlike his contemporaries—he always often just had characters announce what they are doing or who is coming, etc., writing the directions in the lines. He was also at heart a poet; a few of his plays can be definitely be viewed along the lines of narrative poetry. Romeo and Juliet is particularly so musical in its verse it sings. Harold Bloom liked to call Hamlet a “poem unlimited”—apparently that was one of the theater genres at the time. Elizabethans fully accepted drama as poetry too—just not like the ~purer and ~superior non-narrative poetry. Play poets were de facto not real poets.

So tl;dr. Read Shakespeare. With notes, whatever, but read him and make the students read him. People of his time did—hell, Shakespeare probably owned copies of his plays in print, let’s be real. Above all, don’t use film adaptations or even stage adaptations to “teach” the play. It’s in the very name: adaptations, not the original. Most of them deviate from the plot and characters, sometimes wildly, so you can’t even use them for a pop quiz on the plot. They are also usually the chief cause of the worst excesses of fanon headcanons and misconceptions. You would not use the Harry Potter films as educational crutches to teach the Harry Potter books. Why should Shakespeare be any different?