They Stumble that Run Fast: Why I like teaching Shakespeare

            In 1995, I taught in a school district where I wasn’t allowed to teach Joy Luck Club to 17 year olds in an Honors American Lit class because a swear word appears on page 209, and I wasn’t allowed to teach Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or Malcolm X or Toni Morrison’s Beloved, because they were too violent; and I couldn’t say out loud that Oscar Wilde was gay, which I know because our principal called me into his office and told me a parent said I was “recruiting.” At a certain point, I was annoying the Instructional Materials Committee with title requests so much they said I had to get all my dozen department colleagues as well as the principal to read any proposed book and each sign off on it before the IMC would even consider anything else.

            And that was how I fell in love with teaching Shakespeare—gender-flipping, triple-entendre, binary-busting, blood-and-blaspheming, pratfalls and poetry Shakespeare. Reading Shakespeare I was automatically in the clear. Phone calls to the superintendent slowed to a trickle. But I wasn’t going to avoid nuanced or challenging themes or the complacencies that privilege brings to bear; I wasn’t going to infantilize students; I wasn’t going to trade what’s gorgeous and radical in literature—that it allows us to observe and take part in the messiness of social relations and human feeling, to steep ourselves in the experiences and points of view of people not ourselves—for testable content and skills.

           Teaching Shakespeare allowed me to close the door to my classroom and say fuck you, censorship—or rather, fuck you, canker blossom!

            Here’s an example—a Shakespeare text that gains meaning and power from directly mucking around in its grime.

            Many of my ninth grade students have already read Romeo and Juliet by the time they get to high school, and they groan to hear they’re reading it yet again. That means I’ve got them exactly where I want them.

            The play begins. Here come a couple servants from the house of Capulet, talking trash in the street.

SAMPSON: When I have fought with the men, I will be civil with the maids; I will cut off their heads.

GREGORY: The heads of the maids?

SAMPSON: Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maiden-heads. Take it in what sense thou wilt.

Take it in what sense thou wilt. A little translation and students come to attention. Sampson is joking about rape.

GREGORY: They must take it in sense that feel it.

SAMPSON: Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and ‘tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.

Know what Sampson’s talking about there? I ask, whether or not they’ve started buzzing with the language. They hesitate, and I say, He’s talking about his pretty piece of flesh.

            They read these lines in middle school, but their teachers surely didn’t linger. I do. And I do it because there’s rowdiness in Shakespeare’s plays and I want them to experience the energy of that, but also because it feeds themes of the story so deeply—the swagger and energy and teasing and bluster of youth (and then the shattering disbelief when someone dies from their rough play); a sexism so pervasive and natural and potentially violent, Juliet thinks to die or feign death before even for a second imagining running off on an abusive father.

            Soon after, we meet Romeo, one of the great incarnations of love in all the world, and he’s gone nocturnal, running off to the woods each night to weep, and then collapsing in his room each morning for some fitful, despondent sleep. All this is because he’s in love. In love? “Out of her favor where I am in love.” What we find out is that he knows Rosaline doesn’t love him because she “hath Dian’s wit, / And in strong proof of chastity well armed.” After asking students about the goddess Diana (of the hunt) and the detail of most interest to Shakespeare (virgin, never to marry), I ask about chastity. Then students start to say, Wait a minute.

BENVOLIO: Then she hath sworn that she will still live chaste?

ROMEO: She hath, and in that sparing makes huge waste.

            This is such important character development for Romeo. When we first meet him, he is so certain he knows what love is; and he’s so certain that he loves Rosaline; and he feels all over his itchy body that Rosaline has no feelings for him, which he knows because she won’t “ope her lap to saint seducing gold.” Here’s this guy who’s supposed to be the greatest lover of all time, and he’s a just a kid: he’s passionate, articulate, pained, but young and dumb. How can we understand either that Romeo’s love for Juliet is different than this and therefore tragic in its explosive brevity, or even more tragically, that his love is not so different at all, but enthusiastic and bright, trusting and good?

            Take these things together, the boyish bluster of Romeo and Juliet’s wild, young love, and I just want to protect these kids. Because this is what the story for me is about: teenagers at play and in love who get caught in the spokes of adult foolishness. If you take out the rowdiness and horniness and the sexism, how do you understand the tragedy of this childhood forced so needlessly to its end?

            Infantilizing students by stripping literature of its vulgarities and of the disorders the art then reflects smothers students from grappling with issues as adults; and it does something else, too: it doesn’t let them take delight as children.