My breakthrough with Shakespeare's plays came during my senior year at Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Washington. Mr. Sullivan was my teacher. The play was Hamlet.
Mr. Sullivan was a master teacher: wry, tough, and insightful. The power of a great teacher, paired with my tortured teen self-- this made Hamlet come alive. I poured over my Folger’s Shakespeare and bought Cliff’s notes. I did not want to miss anything.
Harold Bloom said in his book Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, "The play's subject … is neither mourning for the dead or revenge on the living. … All that matters is Hamlet's consciousness of his own consciousness, infinite, unlimited, and at war with itself." This was the perfect description of my adolescence mindset-- introspective to a fault, yet exploring everything, despite the contradictions. No wonder the play about a Danish prince was so real!
My next stop was through film-- the sumptuous Romeo and Juliet envisioned by Franco Zeffirelli. Roman Polanski’s Macbeth-- British rock stars on the Scottish heath. This was Shakespeare for the people: accessible, beautiful, and darkly human. Perhaps as Shakespeare himself would want.
As a teacher of Shakespeare, I never tired of teaching Romeo and Juliet. Teenage love is just for starters. Who wields power in societies? What are the origins of conflict? What happens when caretakers cannot be trusted? How does violence happen? How do these issues manifest today? Humanity bursts from Shakespeare’s plays. Mercutio always gets me-- so funny, bawdy, and tragic.
Why have I been thinking about Shakespeare? I came across this article in the New York Times recently: Shakespeare explains the 2016 Election by Stephen Greenblatt from Harvard. He draws parallels between our election and Richard the III, conjuring a familiarity that does not assuage discomfort but enlightens nevertheless. Greenblatt concludes, “Shakespeare’s words have an uncanny ability to reach out beyond their original time and place and to speak directly to us. We have long looked to him, in times of perplexity and risk, for the most fundamental human truths. So it is now.”
Students can see themselves in Shakespeare. Their trials and conflicts are reflected in the characters. More importantly his work has the potential to expand their understanding of the world by providing those connections to other places and times. They will see that jealousy, greed, hunger for power, desire, alienation, loneliness, heartbreak, and humor are not uniquely ours but are threads that connect all of humanity.
To not teach Shakespeare is to deprive our students the human lens from which they can make sense of this complex, challenging, and beautiful world.
-- Lorrie
