When I was forced to read Shakespeare in high school I hated it. We only read the plays, never saw them performed or acted them ourselves. To me they were dead, dead, dead and I thought they were revered simply because they were old.
Years later I saw Measure for Measure on television, and was blown away. It was a riot, with illicit sex, mistaken identities, bawdy jokes, and, best of all, a happy ending! I felt like I’d been cheated in school. So I started reading and watching and now I love Shakespeare.
They need to start high school kids off with one of the comedies, with cross dressing and dirty jokes, maybe Measure for Measure or Twelfth Night Then the reading could progress to the serious plays, the tragedies and histories.
If I was a teacher of English lit in school and a student whined how Shakespeare had no relevance in today’s world, I’d give them what has become mone of my favorite speeches in all the plays. For all that I like comedy, I would give them the admonitory address of the Duke of Burgundy, to the kings of France and England, in Henry V.
From Act V, Scene II
*…let it no disgrace me,
If I demand, before this royal view,
What rub or what impediment there is’
Why that the naked, poor, and mangled Peace,
Dear nurse of arts, plenties and joyful births,
Should not, in this best garden of the world,
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?
Alas! she hath from France too long been chas’d,
And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps,
Corrupting in it’s own fertility,
Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,
Unpruned dies: her hedges even-pleach’d,–
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair,
…
Even so our houses, and ourselves, and children,
Have lost, or do not learn, for want of time,
The sciencesthat should become our country;
But grow, like savages,–as soldiers will,
That nothing do but meditate on blood. *
That sounds like the devestation every war, at any time or place, has wrought. You think of kids raised to revenge in refugee camps, or ancient works of art destroyed in Iraq, or on and on and on.