Recently, her approach to this play has changed. Photo courtesy of Brittany Greeneīrittany Greene teaches Romeo and Juliet to ninth graders at Nazareth (PA) Area High School.
What does a syllabus say about your students and their places in the world? Educators grappling with these questions are teaching, critiquing, questioning, and abandoning Shakespeare’s work, and offering alternatives for updating and enhancing curricula.īrittany Greene’s students engage with plastic swordplay and Jason Reynolds’s Long Way Down. But the essential questions go far deeper than simply “to teach or not to teach.” Educators must ask whose stories are valued and what voices are elevated or silenced. Which raises the question: Is Shakespeare more valuable or relevant than myriad other authors who have written masterfully about anguish, love, history, comedy, and humanity in the past 400-odd years? READ: 10 YA Novels Re-imagine Shakespeare WorksĪ growing number of educators are asking this about Shakespeare, along with other pillars of the canon, coming to the conclusion that it’s time for Shakespeare to be set aside or deemphasized to make room for modern, diverse, and inclusive voices. Shakespeare’s works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir. But should all that ensure him a spot in the curriculum in perpetuity?īen Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporary and fellow playwright, asserted that Shakespeare was “not of an age but for all time.” But he was very much of his time. The plays, sonnets, and poems the Bard wrote in his lifetime (1564–1616) are mainstays of the high school English syllabus. His masterful wordplay, creative use of language, biting wit, puns, and innovative characters and plots have delighted generations of readers and made a lasting impact on literature and the English language.
Shakespeare was a genius wordsmith who created engaging works that spoke to the human condition, psychology, and identity. Here’s a sentence we couldn’t write without William Shakespeare, who invented or introduced nine of these words:Īsk if Shakespeare’s time-honored works and syllabus fixtures should be bumped to embrace the multitudinous other writers and you get hostile, fretful, quarrelsome, or sanctimonious reactions. English teacher Elizabeth Neilson uses an array of references to keep Shakespeare fresh.
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