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i think folk should read shakespeare.
if possible, they should see productions.
so what if they have to expend some effort.
not everything worth doing is easy.
i agree with many of the arguments above as to why: in some of shakespere, you encounter ways of thinking about representation that have interesting and maybe even important philosophical and political consequences.
the density of references in others works, in other media, to questions of representation posed via shakespeare is a second reason why it is important to read his work.
more generally, "the canon" is nothing more than a network of referencepoints. it is as is is because folk use these referencepoints to do other things in the present. what is happening in the present is a continualy refiguring of the "canon"--it is not a thing, it is not stable--if the "canon" is anything beyond a network fo referencepoints, then it is the result modes of cultural production that are only really comprehensable sociologically--demonstrations of cultural power. a canon is a list. if you have cultural power, you get to impose your list over those of others. it is not a natural formation. this is a short version of why i think politicophile's post above about protecting the canon from african literature to be--well----idiotic.
what i would add to the arguments above for teaching shakespeare in high school....i run into a problem with university students--which i assume is imprinted along the way through high school--with reading works that they know they will probably have to read again and again, at different points in their lives because they will see different aspects in different ways as they themselves change. they resist being confronted with materal that is not easily mastered. they do not find it adequately flattering to think that they only get partial access--and even more that there may not be full access, only different readings.
instead students seem to want tidy little packages of self-contained information. they prefer complex works reduced to objects for instant consumption.
they want a simple little world full of simple little objects that they can pretend to have mastered without having to put in too much effort.
they like cliff notes.
easy peasy.
in addition to acclimating to a 16th century mode of writing, concpetually many of shakespeare's plays are not so simple---so they do not fit into this notion of a tidy little world populated with instantly digestable objects that function to reassure the consumer--not a student, a consumer--of the legitimacy of a reduction of the world a realm of consumer goods. i see in this not only an encouraging of intellecutal laziness, whch issues into stagnation--it is also an aspect of a politics that would reduce the horizons of kids to the narrow purview of what exists.
reading complex texts is not an act of reverence toward the past--it is a way of opening up possibilities for both producing and interpreting complex works in the present---it is about pushing students into the circles of interpretation. the argument from eliot's "tradition and the individual talent" that i like runs in this direction: tradition is important in that knowing it enables folk get get the jokes or moves that contemporary artists reappropriate and/or recycle. and these jokes/moves redefine the tradition itself.
art is not entertainment--to my mind art is confrontation--it is about discomfort, it is about trying to force an audience to think, not only about the event or text in itself, but via the event or text about how the world around them is, how it operates---it is about dislocation, which functions to pose questions about what folk who choose to live in a one-dimensional world give up to do that and about a political/cultural order that encourages a one-dimensional world.
for me, art--like philosophy, like history, like thinking in general--- is about corroding a sense of certainty, pushing you into interpretation and functioning to provide tools for carrying out interpretations. and these are about being able to imagine the world otherwise. this is what complex works give you--the shape/refine/reiforce/extend your ability to imagine the world otherwise.
art is about pleasure as well----but unthinking pleasure seems to me not to be pleasure at all. (but that last bit is just me, i suspect)
to my mind, teaching is about finding ways that enable students to enter into the play within these texts, to open them onto the philosophical or political frames that are both within the text and that operate in the present to shape readings. this is tough enough to pull off in university--i have nothing but respect for folk who teach at the high school level who maintain someting like this idea of what they are doing.
teaching high school is a tough gig.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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