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Tuesday, August 9, 2005

Re: Ban Shakespeare from public schools

Posted by on August 9 at 11:41 AM

Christopher, the textbooks in that article are bad not because they contain Shakespeare, but because they make Shakespeare into a dull loser who benevolently passes his hand of genius over human nature—human nature minus sex or drunkenness or slavery, etc. The relevant quotation: “Notice the insight about human life that the following lines from The Tempest convey: ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.’ Shakespeare’s plays are treasures of the English language.” Boooorrring—and from a speech by an ailing old dude, looking back on his long and storied life. It also pushes Shakespeare’s worth on students without bothering to talk about his meaning. Clearly, the quote they should have taken from The Tempest is: “I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed monster. / A most scurvy monster! / I could find in my heart to beat him…” Or better yet, dropped the play about the old guy and gone for something a little more randy: Twelfth Night or Othello, perhaps.

Anthologies are stupid. The texts they’re excerpting usually aren’t.