Case to Cancel & Not Cancel Shakespeare

These Socratic debates are very beneficial and result in something that is the opposite of pyrrhic victory - not only both sides win but also many who aren't even aware of what this debate gain immensely. 

This piece by Allan Stratton created a lot of buzz on the internet last few weeks (obviously by people who read the title and never read the whole piece )

His case is simple, Shakespearean English is hard and we need to make Shakespeare more readable to students so that more students "get" Shakespeare and not make it esoteric. His fault, he chose the word "cancel" in the title. 

So no, I’m not saying Shakespeare should be beached in his entirety. But at the moment, as Cassius says in Julius Caesar, “He doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus” taking up a quarter to a third of each year’s high school English course. You’d think no other playwright existed; why, barely another author.

This has serious consequences for what ought to be the primary function of high school study: developing a love of reading that will last a lifetime. This is next to impossible when your major contact with literature is a guy from the 1500s who wrote with a quill in what might as well be a second language. And when your teachers aren’t theatre people who can bring the works from page to stage, for which they were intended and where they shine.

Only one insightful signal from a myriad of refuting noises came from Sky Gilbert who refuted Allan Stratton's case very nicely. 

Allan thinks that Shakespeare’s language is difficult and old fashioned, and that students today find analyzing the complexities of his old-fashioned rhetoric boring and irrelevant. Yes, Shakespeare essentially writes in another language (early modern English). And reading or even viewing his work can be a tough slog. Not only did he invent at least 1,700 words (some of which are now forgotten today), he favoured a befuddling periodic syntax in which the subject does not appear until the end of a sentence. 

But a study of Shakespeare’s rhetoric is important in 2021. There is one — and only one — exceedingly relevant idea that can be lifted from Shakespeare’s congested imagery, his complex, sometimes confusing metaphors — one jewel that can be dragged out of his ubiquitous references to OVID and Greek myth (references which were obviously effortless for him, but for most of us, only confound). And this idea is very relevant today. Especially in the era of “alternate facts” and “fake news.”

This idea is the only one Shakespeare undoubtedly believed. I say this because he returns to it over and over. Trevor McNeely articulated this notion clearly and succinctly when he said that Shakespeare was constantly warning us the human mind “can build a perfectly satisfactory reality on thin air, and never think to question it.” Shakespeare is always speaking — in one way or another — about his suspicion that the bewitching power of rhetoric — indeed the very beauty of poetry itself — is both enchanting and dangerous. 

I agree with both. Personally, I wouldn't have found my friend Montaigne if not for Sarah Blackwell's distilled book on Montaigne. Nor would I have understood Stoics and Buddha if not for simplified versions of their wisdom. 

Students who are capable of original works should have a choice to read them but at the same time since a  majority of students aren't capable of doing so then we should use "simplified" versions of classic literary works as a catalyst to instill not only the love of literature but wisdom as well.