A Retrospective Reflection on Teaching Shakespeare, the Challenges Involved and Its Value to Education Today

Introduction

 

As someone who has been called a Bardolater (a person who idolises Shakespeare) by both my colleagues and students alike, I will aim to be as objective as possible in discussing: (i) my exposure to the Bard while reading a degree in English; (ii) my experiences with Shakespeare in my teaching career; and finally and most importantly, (iii) the challenges and value of teaching Shakespeare in today’s education in this opinion piece.

 

My exposure to Shakespeare as a reader of Literature

 

I was first introduced to Shakespeare in Secondary 1, when I was first tasked to study Macbeth. Unfortunately, back then my 13 year-old self had neither the intellectual maturity nor the intellectual curiosity to tackle and appreciate Shakespeare. It was not until I was re-introduced to Shakespeare in a Sixth Form College where my Literature tutor passionately taught me how to approach Othello through close, critical reading that I truly fell in love with Shakespeare. While reading English at University I took every Shakespeare module offered. Ironically, I was strongly discouraged from writing my dissertation on Shakespeare and was instead told to focus on an author or topic from the 20th Century and beyond. As my Personal Tutor put it, “This is an English degree not a Shakespeare Studies one”.Consequently, I opted to write my dissertation on Salman Rushdie. Having benefitted from a robust English degree that reflects the twin virtues of breadth where students are encouraged to take a wide range of modules and to graduate with a broad understanding of the development of English literature over time as well as depth that encourages students to tailor courses around their own academic interests, whilst not losing the sense of a wider context, I went on to read a Master’s degree in Shakespeare in History. This was a year dedicated to looking at the Shakespeare Canon both in his time as well as at the reception of his works in the last 400 years from academic, critical and cultural points of view. I have never been one to think that Shakespearean literature should be the only type of literature to be studied, but by the end of this time, I had come to firmly believe that Shakespeare should always be a part of a literature curriculum. I forgot that not everyone is ready for Shakespeare and people all mature academically at different paces; I myself was once not ready for Shakespeare.

 

Shakespeare in my career as a teaching practitioner

 

In my relatively short 5-year teaching career I have had the good fortune of teaching and evaluating the place of Shakespeare in the English literature syllabi on the Singapore-Cambridge GCE O’ Level, Singapore-Cambridge GCE A’ Level, the Cambridge IGCSE, and the International Baccalaureate curricula. Shakespeare’s works are offered as an option as a set-text for the Drama component of literature curricula culminating in students “unpacking” the text studied as well as demonstrating their knowledge and understanding of the text when they are tasked to answer passage-based and discursive essay questions during National Exams. Shakespeare texts are also offered as options on period-based papers and topic-based papers such as The English Renaissance for the former as well as Individual and Society and The Mind and Self in Literature for the latter. For period-based papers, Shakespeare texts are studied comparatively alongside the works of other Renaissance writers and for topic-based papers Shakespeare’s works are studied alongside authors whose works also relate to a specific topic at hand. The IB English literature syllabus does not have a list of specific ‘set-texts’ by various authors that changes every 3 or 4 years; instead, IB teachers can pick any text written by an author found on the ‘Prescribed list of Authors’ and it can be taught and used for any component of assessment for part 3 or 4 of the IBDP English A: Language and Literature course. Only one of any author’s works can be studied and used in either part 3 or part 4. Indeed, even though Shakespeare makes the ‘Prescribed list of Authors’, IB teachers need to carefully consider which work to choose and which part it would best suit, keeping their students’ best interests at heart. Teaching and evaluating the place of Shakespeare in these various curricula made me more pragmatic and compelled me to be conscious and conscientious when asking myself if a school and its students are ready for Shakespeare instead of imposing my earlier view that Shakespeare should always be a part of a literature curriculum. I will elaborate on this as I discuss the challenges and value of teaching Shakespeare in my next two sections.    

 

The challenges I have faced as a Shakespeare-Enthusiast Teaching Practitioner

 

I have decided to discuss the challenges I faced before talking about the value of Shakespeare because I believe the challenges can be overcome and would like to end on a positive note by discussing how Shakespeare is beneficial to today’s education.

 

The first challenge that I have faced while trying to promote teaching the Shakespeare Canon is the one that has often affected and upset me the most. Similar to how literature itself is often either put on a pedestal as an elitist subject that only “smart” children should pursue or conversely that it is a “soft” subject that is of little or no value to students, I have encountered resistance to Shakespeare with one group of people saying it is too hard for the layman and another group saying it is too old and redundant. Adding to this, in some schools Shakespeare is seen as a sort of “status symbol” and could be on the curriculum for the wrong reasons. In other schools, Shakespeare is seen as promoting Colonialism and avoided in favour of more local and regional literature; consequently the problem gets worse as the gulf between what is considered “good literature” and what is not grows, when in fact, studying both Shakespeare and other types of literature together might be the truly beneficial option as we look at how they have both points of convergence and divergence in helping us to understand ourselves and the world we live in.

 

The first challenge I addressed just requires us to be aware of the various reasons leading to the resistance in teaching Shakespeare, and I earnestly hope it makes us think about whether we are choosing to teach (or to not teach) Shakespeare for the right reasons, and that his works should always be part of a wider literature curriculum. The second issue is a more complex one. My journey as a reader of literature ignited my passion for Shakespeare, which I pursued relentlessly. Literature degrees from different universities are wonderfully varied and graduates come out having specialised in the period, author, or area that intrigued them the most. As a literature teacher, suddenly one may find oneself working with colleagues who have different areas of specialisation. However, often only one ‘set-text’ can be chosen and a tug of war begins, even though everyone has acquired the skill-set to unpack any text through the literature degree and the pedagogy to scaffold it for our students through teacher training. We want to teach what we are most passionate about, comfortable with or what we deem is easiest or best for our students. I have found that the only way to get around this is to put our students’ best interests at heart. This means asking ourselves “which text are the majority of us most confident teaching?”, “which text has the most teaching resources available?” and “will my weakest student be able to fully understand and tackle this text under exam conditions?” As I evolved as a teacher I have often continued to push for a Shakespeare text to be chosen as a ‘set-text’ for one part or component of a paper, but now with more objectivity. Sometimes there are texts that are better suited when compared to the Shakespeare one being offered, and in those times, I recommend Shakespeare as an outside-curriculum reading. This challenge has shown me that like a lot of other good things in life, the value of Shakespeare cannot be imposed.

 

The value of Shakespeare

 

Having considered the challenges in teaching Shakespeare, I want to now focus on the value of teaching Shakespeare.

 

What I feel makes teaching Shakespeare most valuable is how timeless and universal his works are. If we look at his 4 Great Tragedies, the tragic heroes’ hamartia (fatal flaw leading to their tragic downfall); ambition, indecisiveness, jealously and pride are all weaknesses that we can relate to and remain relevant in this day and age. This, coupled with how Shakespeare has constructed some truly memorable complex characters who are part of exciting plotlines with dramatic peaks and troughs, makes Shakespeare very teachable and valuable to students. Indeed, students may need time to adjust to the language, but if we have students who are ready or can be readied for it, and we teach and inspire them to confidently navigate language that may seem archaic and unfamiliar, they will be able to benefit both from appreciating the universal issues that are at the  core of Shakespeare texts as well as critically considering how language evolves through time. Studying Shakespeare could also show them that they should not be afraid of unfamiliar language and the ambiguity in it, which could develop their critical and creative sensibilities.

 

Looking at Shakespeare in the context of his time enables us to educate and inform our students about how that period is a very significant time in the evolution of English literature and theatre. Beyond this, studying Shakespeare’s time can lead to a fascinating comparison with contemporary issues, such as race, religion, sexuality, nation, and war. For students, it is a way for them to comment on these issues while giving them a bit of distance in a way that we might not have while talking about issues like xenophobia today. Shakespeare wrote in an Age of Discovery, he had an audience that had moved from learning about foreign lands from books, myths, and legends to hearing about actual experiences of people travelling and trading, and about diplomats coming from other parts of the world to visit Elizabeth’s and James’ court. There was a moment of possibility there that had not been seen before which became entrenched after, which really shaped the stage in the Elizabethan era.

 

Shakespeare’s time was also one of religious uncertainty and unrest, in an Early Modern period where religion was something people turned to for understanding themselves; there was a shift from a Catholic to a Protestant reign. Today’s world, where we are thinking about our relationships with various Muslim countries, in many ways parallels Shakespeare’s time as there is so much research on Elizabethan views on the Ottoman Empire and interactions between the two. We can discover how people responded with a profound sense of threat and unease to people they did not really understand.

 

Ultimately, it is this universality and longevity of Shakespeare’s works that make them so valuable to study, regardless of whether a work is studied on its own or comparatively as part of a period or topic-based paper. Looking at Shakespeare’s texts in their context and / or how they have been adapted and performed on the screen and stage in the last 400 years enable them to make English a good bedfellow and interdisciplinary subject to be studied together with subjects such as theatre, history, sociology, philosophy, and politics, to name a few. Perhaps, these are among the reasons why Harold Bloom’s statement that ‘Shakespeare has been universally judged to be a more adequate representer of the universe of fact than anyone else’ continues to be valid today.

 

Conclusion

 

Having reached the conclusion of this opinion piece; I hope it reads like more than just a retrospective reflection of my experiences studying and teaching Shakespeare but rather that it offers some insights to the challenges and values in teaching Shakespeare. My Literature Professor, Robert Eaglestone, once said:

 

'Literature thinks. Literature is where ideas are investigated, lived out, explored in all their messy complexity… Perhaps… "think" is not the right word: "think" is too limiting a description of the range of what a text can do with ideas. In any event, the way literature thinks is bound up with what it’s like to be us, to be human. Literature is how we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves.'

 

I believe it is important to see how Shakespeare’s works have the capacity to do exactly this if they are offered for the right reasons and are approached and taught in the right way.