Along with fresh, arresting work by Frank Bidart, Lloyd Schwartz, and Chase Twitchell, and a mesmerizing portfolio of portraits by the late Ralph Hamilton, the Spring/Summer issue of Salmagundi features a symposium provoked by an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. “Shakespeare Wasn’t Woke,” by children’s book author Meghan Cox Gordon, argues that a movement called #DisruptTexts is infiltrating public schools “to promote a pernicious idea: that children are harmed if they encounter classic literature that doesn’t conform to contemporary sensibilities about race, gender, and sexuality.” Thus, according to Gordon, “some English teachers in American schools oppose the teaching of Shakespeare lest students be hurt by the violence, misogyny, and racism in his plays.”
Here’s what I know about the Wall Street Journal: although its reporting and features remain independent, its editorial page conforms to the world view of Rupert Murdoch. It’s a world increasingly hostile towards public education. It can share Donald Trump’s penchant for phrases like “people are saying” to promote premises unsupported by evidence, as echoed here by Gordon’s “some English teachers.” Who’s saying? What percentage of teachers? We’ll never know.
The platform of #DisruptTexts doesn’t mention Shakespeare, but if you want writers to rally for a cause, let them believe the Bard is under attack. This isn’t new. Calls for a multicultural, relevant curriculum date from the 1960s; efforts to bump Shakespeare have been around since the post-structuralist 1990s. Creative writing teachers who rely on the close reading of books have long skirmished with critical theorists who examine texts, exacerbating departmental splits between writing and literature. I once had a respected poet/critic question why I was teaching a Shakespeare sonnet to an Intro to Creative Writing class (and who, during my observation, completely misread the poem’s final couplet).
As to the symposium’s essays, my sentiments most closely align with Siri Hustvedt’s “Reshuffling the Canon.” But I’m most touched by “Instruments of Oppression.” Robert Boyers graduated from Queens College several years before I did, and afterwards taught English at Flushing High School. From his essay, I see that the New York City high school curriculum hadn’t changed since my days at Christopher Columbus. I too read Silas Marner; my adored English teacher called the heroine “schleppy Eppie.” I didn’t fare much better with A Tale of Two Cities. Rereading the book recently, after my enchantment with the ferocity of Bleak House, I found it befuddling; its allusions to smuggling along the English coast—bakers who baked no bread, and cobblers who mended no shoes (I’m paraphrasing here)—would have sailed over the head of the brightest sophomore. In junior year, in an Honors class of 45 students, I sat in the back, whispering with friends. Our outdated textbook included the pre-Johnson versions of Dickinson’s poems, and I remember only Amy Lowell’s “Patterns.” Did our dedicated teacher, a veteran, spend extra time with it?
What led me to major in English at Queens when the fare provided by the Board of Education was so unappetizing? In my senior AP English class, I met a teacher with passion who ordered off the menu. Of all the genres, she loved drama best, and we read play after play after play. The Oresteia. Oedipus Rex. Shakespeare in the Folger paperback editions with notes en face. Jean Anouilh. Pirandello. In addition, in the mid-1960s, a consortium of theaters offered free tickets to city high school students and, as AP seniors, we were the lucky recipients. Mrs. Michelson organized trips to Manhattan, where she’d meet us after we took our long subway rides.
Her curriculum might have been Euro-centric, but it was also international. It embraced a genre in which all sorts of bodies vivify language. It allowed us to see living writers making art, at a time when I absorbed from the high school canon that poetry was something people wrote once, but didn’t any more. Here was a much keener instrument of oppression than the Disrupters ever envisioned: Literature was something made in the past; no one else need apply; the memory card is full.
Shakespeare in Love won the Best Picture Oscar in 1999; Will in the World was a best-seller in 2004, as is Hamnet today. The Shakespeare in Prisons Network 2020-21 podcasts include “The Future is Now: A Social Justice Roadmap,” “Prison Theater and the Global Crisis of Incarceration,” and “My Relationship with Shakespeare: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” From any perspective, Shakespeare’s imprint on our culture seems—well, unshakeable. Let’s make access to art-making just as central to every students’ education.