In his Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, (1998), Harold Bloom wrote "no other writer, before or since Shakespeare, has accomplished so well the virtual miracle of creating utterly different yet self-consistent voices for his more than one hundred characters and many hundreds of highly distinctive minor personages." Ten years later (2008), Maggi Trapp expressed a similar observation:
"Shakespeare’s plays and poems still matter to us because his plots still resonate, his characters still leave their mark, his language still moves and startles,” says Trapp. "His characters are ones we identify with. We understand Hamlet’s despondency; we recognize Othello’s envy; we feel Lear’s decline. These characters are, at once, types and revelations. Shakespeare’s characters are familiar, and at the same time they surprise us out of our complacency—and in this way they are endlessly fascinating."
Yet Shakespeare, the "quintessence" of English literature, isn't required for English majors at most colleges and universities. According to one statistic, only 8% of the country's top universities require their English majors to enroll in a Shakespeare class. Over the past thirty years, those who have worked to eliminate the traditional Shakespeare requirement have offered consistent reasons for dropping him:
- the plays of literature are antiquated and politically irrelevant;
- the plays of literature are racist and misogynistic;
- the plays privilege the hierarchal white/male power structure.
The first reason is obviously the most absurd. Everything from the past is old, but not automatically "antiquated." If that were the case, then reading history, watching old films, listening to classical music, and visiting museums to see Old Masters or Impressionists paintings would be a waste of time.
Arguing that Shakespeare's plays are racist and misogynistic condemns those works for accurately depicting the world as Shakespeare knew it: a world that had not yet evolved to recognize the equality of all human beings (and frankly, something we still are struggling to achieve.).
Shakespeare's plays do not in fact perpetuate sexist or racist ideas. They neither affirm nor deny any beliefs, doctrines, or attitudes. To take offense at his depiction of women, or other minority groups, is to narrowly read his works through an anachronistic lens. What they do is explore and reveal as wide a variety of human nature as possible in the most verbally expansive language poets and authors of English have ever produced. That variety, for example, does include characters who are racist, misogynistic, and malevolent; but also characters who are compassionate, loving, loyal, benevolent, heroic, tragic, and profound.
All English majors should read at least the five great tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar. To not read these plays is to deprive oneself of experiencing characters whose linguistic and psychological depth and range exceed anyone we will encounter in this life. For example, read what Hamlet has to say about life:
"There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
(This quotation needs no explanation.)
"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" Hamlet
(How modern this speech is. How often have we felt the grandeur of our species, only to have the actions of others erode our belief in the good of humanity.)
Or Macbeth, who after his crime, suffers the effects of a guilty conscience on sleep:
"Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!/Macbeth does murder sleep," the innocent sleep,/Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,"
Or the villain Iago, on Jealousy as he manipulates Othello:
"Beware, my lord, of jealousy;? It is the green-eye'd monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on,"
Or King Lear on the consequences of foolish actions and the ravages of age:
"I am a very foolish fond old man,/Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less,/And, to deal plainly,/I fear I am not in my perfect mind."
And of course, there is Julius Caesar. The political lessons from the play resonate even today. Like Trump, Caesar wished to be a dictator and loved to be flattered:
"But when I tell him he hates flatterers,/He says he does, being then most flattered."
There is no denying that Shakespeare will continue to occupy the center of western culture. Disagreeable as that may be to those who want to "decolonize" what is taught in colleges and K-12 schools, there is no escaping the fact that, as Majorie Garber noted, "Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare." Those who eagerly dismiss Shakespeare's plays as irrelevant often failed to see the influence his works continue to have on our everyday thoughts and speech:
"A wild goose chase." Romeo and Juliet
"For goodness sake." Henry VIII
"One fell swoop." Macbeth
"Mums the word." Henry VI, part 2
"Knock knock! Who's there?" Macbeth
"It's Greek to me." Julius Caesar
"Break the ice." Taming of the Shrew
"Such stuff as dreams are made of." The Tempest
"I will wear my heart upon my sleeve." Othello
"Truth will out." The Merchant of Venice
"Though this be madness, yet there is method in it." Hamlet
"Full circle" King Lear
"Neither rhyme nor reason." The Comedy of Errors
"Not slept one wink." Cymbeline
It is perhaps ironic that these expressions, and many of the words Shakespeare himself coined, still flow naturally through our daily language (even the language of those who would eliminate him from secondary schools and colleges). Reading his plays are considerably more difficult than reading the contemporary works that students find "more relevant," but with a moderate amount of mental exertion students will acquire a substantially richer command of English and a deeper intimacy with the complexities of the human mind.
Of course, English majors should go on taking classes in contemporary, and multicultural literature as they pursue their degrees. If they do attend a college that does not require a Shakespeare course, then they should exercise intellectual independence, ignore those who anachronistically apply contemporary standards to pre-contemporary works of art, and take at least a course on his major tragedies. They will never regret reading his plays and they won't say someday in the future that "the fault, dear [students] lies not within the stars, but within ourselves" that we have missed what is most extraordinary and essential in all of literature.