The film Shakespeare in Love comes out on video on Tuesday, August 10, so it seems an appropriate moment to celebrate the genius of the greatest genius of English literature. The portrait to the left is contested, as is virtually everything about the life of the Bard. I have written about this elsewhere, and Mark Alexander, who graces the universe with his Richard Mitchell page graces it also with a detailed examination of the authorship question. Further down I discuss why Shakespeare in Love, a fiction and a farce, is nevertheless useful for guerrilla schooling purposes. There are many new Shakespearean films in the pipeline, and this is a sustained glimmering of hope. “We are not now that strength,” says Tennyson, “which in old days moved earth and heaven,” but what we have been we might yet become again...

—GSS

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The silencing of the lambs...

Exhibit one

Romeo: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.

Romeo: Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.

Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

Romeo: Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.

Juliet: You kiss by the book.

Exhibit two

For young ladies too, it has been the intention chiefly to write; because boys being generally permitted the use of their fathers’ libraries at a much earlier age than girls are, they frequently have the best scenes of Shakespeare by heart, before their sisters are permitted to look into this manly book; and, therefore, instead of recommending these Tales to the perusal of young gentlemen who can read them so much better in the originals, their kind assistance is rather requested in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand: and when they have helped them to get over the difficulties, then perhaps they will read to them (carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister’s ear) some passage which has pleased them in one of these stories, in the very words of the scene from which it is taken; and it is hoped they will find that the beautiful extracts, the select passages, they may choose to give their sisters in this way will be much better relished and understood from their having some notion of the general story from one of these imperfect abridgments; which if they be fortunately so done as to prove delightful to any of the young readers, it is hoped that no worse effect will result than to make them wish themselves a little older, that they may be allowed to read the Plays at full length (such a wish will be neither peevish nor irrational).

I have a wish, and it may well be peevish and irrational. You decide.

Exhibit one is from Romeo and Juliet. I love that passage because it is so thrillingly loving, but I love it also because Shakespeare betrays so much respect for the minds of his young lovers. And they are very young. Juliet is thirteen, and yet she walks her full half of this metaphorical pilgrimage of love.

But, the stock rejoinder runs, “Romeo and Juliet” is fiction. Real children aren’t like that. Aren’t they? Exhibit two is from “Tales from Shakespeare”, which was first published in 1806 by Charles and Mary Lamb. It’s tough sledding, so it may help for me to tell you that the topic of that ponderous 250 word sentence is: Easy reading. “Tales from Shakespeare” is the prototype of all the dumbed-down books that infest school libraries; it was the first of its kind. And what is charming about it is that the Lambs produced this book not because children of ten or thirteen lacked the ability to read Shakespeare in the original, but because their fathers might not permit young ladies early exposure to the unexpurgated, unbowdlerized, un-dumbed-down, raw, naked poetry.

Shakespeare is brilliant on every ground, it goes without saying. Entirely too much without saying. We revere him without saying precisely why we do, and the breach he is more honor’d in is his own. Well, once more unto that. The ground that I would most honor him on is here: He wrote in English.

What?! Isn’t that the chief complaint against Shakespeare, that his language, while it might be lyrical, is anything but English? True enough, Elizabethan English takes some getting used to, and the poet is deliberately not making things easy. But at a time when virtually all works of the mind, all across Europe, were being done in Latin, Shakespeare and a few other Renaissance pioneers dared to write poetry in their own native tongues. And of those brave experimenters, Shakespeare was the most brilliantly successful. By his success should we be schooled.

Do you understand? We have schools where eighty or ninety or ninety-five percent of the inmates emerge unschooled, with no hope whatever of unpacking the meaning from the Lambs, much less from Shakespeare. Of the few bright children who escape from our schools able to read and to reason at some ‘level of literacy’, very few are able to think and to write in English. They cannot “find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones and good in every thing.” Instead, they are ‘educated’, and they can only locate lingual appendages emerging paradoxically from arboreal organisms, recover learning materials inexplicably miscatalogued in limited-flow watercourse environments, audit faith-based oral presentations emanating by undocumented means from mineral compounds and investigate an hypothesized and possibly apochryphal propensity for persistent pandemic praiseworthiness. Words without end, amen.

Who is more ignorant, the child who cannot read English, or the childish adult who cannot write it? The lambs are silenced and the sheep say only nothing...

The point is this, my wish, my prayer: I wish that children in school today were educated to the same high standards that were being used in the England of the Lambs. “Romeo and Juliet” is fiction, but real children are that clever, if they are schooled. The works of Shakespeare, unexpurgated, unbowdlerized, un-dumbed-down, are very fine texts for such a schooling.

—Greg Swann

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Shakespeare in Love and children

We live by the belief that children have no idea what is too onerous, too burdensome, too insufferably heavy for their fragile mental frames. In truth, they can bear far more that we might give them credit for. Our home is well-laden with Shakespeare, and we don’t tell the children that his plays are difficult even for adults. They like the action and the humor, and they don’t know that they’re bearing the greater weight of Western civilization on their frail shoulders. Like Hamlet with Gertrude, father to his mother, sometimes parents must be cruel to be kind.

The movie Shakespeare in Love is a kind way to begin a Shakespearean conspiracy of cruelty. The film is very fun, very funny, bright and sprightly and never dull. It is fairly consistently bawdy, but never tawdry, and as with the Bard himself every bit of this will slide right past your children. There are three brief scenes where you might want to cover younger children’s eyes, but that’s all.

In compensation, your children will get an incomparable Shakespeare-made-easy introduction to the beauty and majesty of some of the greatest poetry ever written. The play within the movie is Romeo and Juliet, and vast tracts of it are lovingly and compellingly performed.

As with Shakespeare’s own works, the ‘groundlings’ are never ignored, so younger youngsters will absorb the high art patiently while waiting for the low comedy of the subplots. Shakespeare in Love is a fine introduction to Shakespeare by enacting and mirroring one of the great tragedies. But it is also a fine introduction to Shakespeare by being made very much in the antic spirit of the romantic comedies. Not a dull moment on the screen, not a squirm or a fidget in the audience, not a dry eye in the house at the end.

The next phase in the conspiracy is to lay on more and better at once. Older children will immerse themselves in the Franco Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet. Younger ones might be happier with his Taming of the Shrew, the world’s only action-adventure chick flick. Hamlet is popular here, both the two-hour Zeffirelli and the four-hour Kenneth Branagh extravaganza. Branagh’s Henry V is a martial feast for young warriors, and his Much Ado About Nothing and Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night are both joyous romantic comedies. Some recent films—such as the Ian McKellan Richard III—are not appropriate for younger children, but there is a great wealth of older films in the classics section of the video store, including works by Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles.

And then there is Shakespeare in performance, more thrilling if less spectacular. Plays are sometimes hard to find, but smaller theater companies all over the world present Shakespeare frequently. Better yet, perform the plays yourself at home. You can find the complete works of Shakespeare fairly cheaply if you shop around, either in printed form or on CD-ROM. You can find the plays for free on-line. And we are fond of Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories books. Garfield renders the major plays as short stories, retaining much of the original dialogue. They’re lavishly illustrated and fun for children to read or to have read to them.

One day not too far from now your children will be confronted by a dusty, fusty, crabbed and cranky professor of ‘litchracha’ who will do everything he can to wring every last bit of life out of Shakespeare and of every great artist of the Western canon. By a cruel conspiracy of kindness, you can inoculate your children from this foul creature, giving them a love for poetry and for art that can never be wrested away. Shakespeare in Love is a very good way to begin.

—GSS

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