Taking my turn with Ol' Bill

How did I know my Shakespeare teaching methods worked?

Blasphemy. That’s what I thought when I read the following comments on Substack this morning. The nerve…

Having read and enjoyed a few of Ms. Selonick’s sharp, stinging Substack posts over the 17 months I’ve been lingering on here, this one took me aback. Stop talking about Shakespeare? And this, after I just reprised a summertime column about Apple TV’s recent crackerjack revival of Macbeth in honor of No Kings Day, a play from 1606 that has startling — and scary — relevance to our current political situation. Stop talking about The Bard? What?

There are those who have felt the same way. Mark Twain, for instance.

Teaching Shakespeare at a struggling Florida High School took some nerve but it was worth it

While it’s not common knowledge that Mark Twain went to the trouble of writing a play called “Is He Dead?,” which he appears to take a very skeptical look at Shakespeare’s myth and career, trotting out the standard issue Baconian theories (That Sir Francis Bacon actually authored Shakespeare’s plays). Twain’s arguments include that little was known of his life, his biography was based on conjecture, he left his wife his second-best bed, nobody ever found any discarded manuscripts or unfinished plays, etc.

In “Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years,” author Karen Lystra contends something else. “Though it is commonly assumed to be nothing more than a stale and embarrassing rehash of the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, Twain was up to something more than flimsy literary criticism. He was using the debate over Shakespeare’s real identity to satirize prejudice, intolerance, and self-importance—in himself as well as others....:”

With Twain, of course, there’s a catch.

“After his passionate diatribe against the “Stratfordolators” and his vigorous support of the Baconians, he cheerfully admits that both sides are built on inference. Leaving no doubt about his satirical intent, Twain then gleefully subverts his entire argument. After seeming to be a serious, even angry, combatant, he denies that he intended to convince anyone that Shakespeare was not the real author of his works. “It would grieve me to know that any one could think so injuriously of me, so uncomplimentarily, so unadmiringly of me,” he writes mockingly. “Would I be so soft as that, after having known the human race familiarly for nearly seventy-four years?” We get our beliefs at second hand, he explains, “we reason none of them out for ourselves. It is the way we are made.” Twain has set a trap—an elaborate joke at the expense of what he scornfully refers to as the “Reasoning Race.” He is satirizing the need to win an argument when it is virtually impossible to convince anyone to change sides in almost any debate.”

Which does seem pertinent these days, doesn’t it?

Finally, in reviewing Ron Chernow’s recent mammoth biography of Twain, The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood notes: “In his last, most pathetic years, Mark Twain threw himself behind the crackpot theory that the true author of Shakespeare’s plays may have been Francis Bacon. The penultimate book that Twain published in his lifetime, Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909), asked his readers to consider how few solid biographical details existed about Shakespeare the man, and how much critics had inferred from so little. They had built, Twain wrote, “an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.” The literary critic Northrop Frye, who dismissed the Bacon theory, nevertheless had a wry aside of his own about extrapolating too freely from scattered biographical details and the unflattering portrait that is the only surviving image of Shakespeare. “We know nothing about Shakespeare,” Frye wrote, “except a signature or two, a few addresses, a will, a baptismal register, and the picture of a man who is clearly an idiot.” Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain forces a similar conclusion about its subject: clearly an idiot, and a born sucker.”

In my dozen years as a high school educator, I counted on Shakespeare as my step towards higher education. Though I was far from enamored of his work in high school — You want to bore some kids, ask them to flat-out read Olde English out of a textbook — an enlightening experience in college with a magnificent teacher pulled back the blinds of Shakespeare for me and I was determined to share his work with my classes. Teaching at a struggling school in Havana, one where the average student arrived at 9th grade at least two reading levels behind, I believed in Shakespeare and was confident that somehow I would make it work. I knew what it did for me, I thought I could do it for them. I think I did.

We did Macbeth and Hamlet every year and after their initial panic at translating the Olde English, they came to love the plays. As they were designed as plays, we would watch and discuss what was going on before the scene and after it, instead of just reading ancient English out of the text book the way they made us do it in high school.

And high school kids or not, when we got to the the climactic duel scene at the end of Hamlet and Laertes cuts him with the poisoned blade, I saw one student leap to her feet, screaming “NO!” at the screen. I saw another break into inconsolable tears at his onscreen death, so bad that we actually had to pause the video and help her get over it.

They laughed with delight at Hamlet’s wild actions during “The Mousetrap” just as Shakespeare would have wanted them to. And while we were watching Macbeth, where, after the murder of Duncan, we would see Lady Macbeth futilely wringing her hands as if to wash off Duncan’s blood, I caught some in my class mimicking her actions.

But the moment that won me, thrilled me, convinced me that Ol’ Bill and I had given them something to carry into their post-school lives came a few months after we finished the play.

In the Franco Zeffirelli version with Mel Gibson as Hamlet, one very compelling and popular scene with my class was his possibly staged confrontation with Ophelia. Possibly staged because King Claudius and Polonius were listening in, which Hamlet suspected and she did not.

Honoring her father’s wishes, Ophelia returns some things to Hamlet, who claims he never gave them to her in the first place. Things escalate until Hamlet, burning with anger over all women (he’s learned about his mother sleeping with his uncle), blasts her with an array of insults, including “God has given you one face and you make another” as one of a staggering array of insults. He leaves her with a curse.

Some months later, it’s Senior Picture Day at Gadsden County High and the cafeteria is filled with the girls of our senior class. And while I will acknowledge I am far from an expert on the topic of cosmetics, foundation, lip gloss, eyeliner, etc., I do know that when I walked past a student of mine and she said, “Mr. Nogo, aren’t you going to say ‘Hi?” something might have been amiss in the application of such various and sundry cosmetic substances for her senior photo. The more they applied, the better they’d look, seemed to be the concept.

That was when Eric Green, a middling student but evidently a very perceptive and observant senior, walked past the row of them, stopped in his tracks and spoke Shakespeare’s words as if he had written them himself.

“God has given you one face and you make another,” he said, gesturing dramatically towards the row of cosmetic excess.

It was time for Mr. Nogo to get back to class.

Stop talking about Shakespeare? No can do.