Shakespeare, like youth, is wasted on the young. Or is it?

0

Had Dana Dusbiber written the op-ed piece she had in the Washington Post last week while I was in high school, I would have nominated her for teacher of the year.

As would most of my classmates. 

Dusbiber teaches English at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. Burbank High is described by the Washington Post as Sacramento’s largest inner-city school, “with all students coming from low-income homes and a majority of them minorities.” Dusbiber is white.

Dusbiber’s 15-minutes-offame-winning essay explains why she doesn’t like Shakespeare and doesn’t teach him.

If I had read it during my junior year, she would have had me before I finished the first paragraph:

“I am a high school English teacher,” she wrote. “I am not supposed to dislike Shakespeare. But I do. And not only do I dislike Shakespeare because of my own personal disinterest in reading stories written in an early form of the English Language that I cannot always easily navigate, but also because there is a WORLD of really exciting literature out there that better speaks to the needs of my very ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students.”

(Actually, Shakespeare wrote in modern English but with a lot of words and usages that are now considered archaic.)

In my junior and senior year I was exposed to Shakespeare — Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet if memory serves. I had a bad reaction to it. The text was hard to understand, the characters weren’t particularly believable, and the plots left me cold. But week after week we slogged through the plays. By the time I graduated, I had a “personal disinterest” in reading Shakespeare.

And, like Ms. Dusbiber, I believed there was a WORLD of really exciting literature out there that better spoke to my needs — and I had a laser-like focus on it. It was called science fiction. I read over 500 science fiction books in high school. I became proficient at reading — and learned to love reading — by reading them. Both the novels and the genre spoke to me in ways Shakespeare never did.

(It was only much later that I learned that the only science fiction novel that I found genuinely terrifying — Forbidden Planet, a novelization of the screenplay for the 1956 science fiction movie — had appropriated a number of themes from The Tempest.)

Fortunately, there was a cure for a Shakespeare allergy, and Dr. William Markward of the University of Colorado Boulder English Department administered it in the summer of 1961. Markward taught two courses in Shakespeare that summer; with some trepidation I took them both. One of the plays he emphasized was Henry the Fourth, Part I. And in a heaven-sent stroke of luck, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival staged Henry the Fourth, Part I that year.

Markward didn’t just have us read the plays. He read the plays to us. Markward had performed as a Shakespearean actor. He knew how to turn the text into the spoken word, which was how Shakespeare, who was writing plays not novellas, intended his work to be presented. Markward loved Shakespeare, and he wore his love on his sleeve. It was infectious.

As he read, the text came alive. The archaic words and usages when spoken in context revealed their meaning. Navigation became easier. The content started to make sense. The power of the poetry came shining through. And suddenly Shakespeare became not just understandable… but genuinely and profoundly entertaining.

Based on my experience, I think Dusbiber has a valid point. If the only thing you accomplish by forcing students to read Shakespeare is to make them disinterested in reading, then it’s stupid to stuff Shakespeare down their throats. You’re much better off assigning books they’ll enjoy reading and have them coming back for more.

So yes, if Dusbiber had written her piece in 1959, or even 1961, I would have been shouting “Right on!” or words to that effect.

And I would be doing so today if she had had the wit to shut up after the first paragraph.

Unfortunately, Ms. Dusbiber chose to share some additional things she doesn’t like about Shakespeare like the fact that he was 1) white, 2) male, 3) lived 450 years ago, 4) is dead, and 5) is kept in the curriculum by white people.

“What I worry about is that as long as we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’s view of life as he lived it so long ago, we (perhaps unwittingly) promote the notion that other cultural perspectives are less important… I have heard countless times, from respected teachers (mostly white), that they will ALWAYS teach Shakespeare, because our students need Shakespeare and his teachings on the human condition,” she wrote. (All caps, italics and parentheses are hers.)

There may be legitimate pedagogical reasons for not teaching Shakespeare to high school students, but the fact that he is a dead white male who lived 450 years ago are not among them.

Dusbiber also says that the nub of her argument is “If we only teach students of color, as I have been fortunate to do my entire career, then it is far past the time for us to dispense with our Eurocentric presentation of the literary world.”

What I worry about is that Ms Dusbiber’s racist, sexist and agist prejudices will result in her students of color being mal-educated and ill-prepared to enter the world in which they will spend their lives.

Black high school students are going to graduate into a society whose intellectual, cultural, political, and economic foundations and institutions are Eurocentric. It will be orders of magnitude harder for them to thrive in that society if they enter it as cultural illiterates.

One final thought: For the last year America’s race hustlers, black and white, have been howling their heads off about “White Privilege” — and (perhaps not unintentionally) in the process conjuring up its evil twin, Black Envy.

Which is why Dusbiber does need to expose her students to at least one Shakespeare play — Othello. It’s about how envy and jealousy can corrupt and destroy even the most successful and charismatic of men. A Black man, in this case. The play was written 411 years ago (in 1604). If you want to know why it should be taught today, cast Al Sharpton as Iago.

This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.