I recently listened to part of a discussion on the CBC concerning the use of Shakespeare text in high school education. Now, for a number of reasons, I don't usually pay attention to such discussions. One of the reasons that I avoid such issues is that I believe that there are so many rationally incoherent ideas peddled by so-called experts on the subject of literature, that I just find it aggravating listening to people propagate these notions, particularly when they are holding themselves up as specialists. I actually believe that with the exception of certain issues such as complex structures of symbolism or technical issues in traditional poetry, one doesn't need specialized knowledge to talk insightfully about literature, though I have met dozens of English teachers and professors who are desperate to maintain their specialist and professional status. Another reason that I avoid such discussions is that despite the fact that there are many ways to talk about and/or understand literature, the vast majority of people promote the idea that there is basically one way and they essentially represent that exclusive methodology. One particularly egregious example of this tendency is the near universal habit of talking about literature in relation to "what the author meant." People hold on to this strategy despite the fact that over sixty years ago, W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe Beardsley successfully undermined the notion of authorial intent as an exclusively meaningful interpretation of a work or text. What they called the "intentional fallacy" continues to be the primary methodology of literary criticism and theory despite the fact that this notion has been undermined not only by Wimsatt and Beardsley but by more than half a century of Continental Philosophy and literary theory which has made it clear that not only can the author's intent be dispensed with if you so choose but there is no objective or authoritative way to understand what literature is, let alone a correct way to talk about it. The quite simple fact is that you can define literature how you choose and, more importantly, you can talk about it and analyze it however you want. One thing I have learned is that if someone tells you that there is one "correct" way to think about and analyze literature, this methodology is most likely hiding an ideological agenda.
In relation to the CBC segment on Shakespeare, I particularly avoid discussions about this subject because of the widespread phenomenon called Bardolatry. Bardolatry is, exactly what it sounds like, the tendency to idealize Shakespeare (aka, the Bard). Its hard to talk about Shakespeare because admiration of him is so deep and widespread that any discourse about him often begins with the assumptions that he is infallible and his status and brilliance cannot be questioned. The most egregious example of Bardolatry I have ever found comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge who once suggested that you couldn't criticize Shakespeare unless you a priori accept that he is the greatest writer ever. Such claims would be amusing if their weren't so bizarre and elitist. I actually have nothing against Shakespeare in the classroom. His work can be a remarkable font of interest and entertainment. But the phenomenon of Bardolatry actually inhibits students' ability to talk about and enjoy Shakespeare's work because in classic top-down teaching strategies, students are not allowed to explore Shakespeare, but rather they are told what to think.
I was particularly struck in the CBC discussion of Shakespeare with the hackneyed claim made by a man who I believe is a high school English teacher that what makes Shakespeare so good is the degree of "universalism" in his stories. This claim is so common and widespread that I can't believe that there is anyone who has been to high school (at least in English) who hasn't heard it at one time or another. It is a belief that I think, though widespread, is basically nonsense. Looking for a cognitive bias that this claim exposes, the closest one I could come up with is the "illusory truth effect." This effect is the tendency to believe something because it is easy to process or because it is so widely believed and repeated that its actual veracity is never brought into question. But here's the thing - it takes a whole linguistic, cultural, and educational structure to even vaguely understand what Shakespeare's works are about, let alone to have any deeper comprehension of the content and meaning. Shakespeare, in fact, fails even the most basic test of what the word universal means let alone any more rigorous notion of universal understanding. Anyone making such claims about Shakespeare's work (or any literary work) is actually a priori assuming a whole structure of indoctrination before Shakespeare's so-called universalism can be understood. When someone is making such a claim about the universalism of a work of art, what they are really saying is that if you can read the original work or the work of a translator (and keep in mind that learning to read is itself a complex sociopolitical act which implies a whole structure of ideological and cultural indoctrination), then you can access a set of universal implications in the work. But, of course, not only are the acts of learning to read and understand the concepts involved ideologically loaded, but any analyzes of the issues talked about after that process of learning takes place will be unable to escape ideological and cultural biases.
A typical counterargument to what I have said here is that this is a misinterpretation of the word "universal" and what is really meant when we talk about Shakespeare's universalism is that the themes found in his work, such as love, jealousy, hate, fear, etc., are universal in nature and that they can be appreciated by anyone. The primary problem with this claim should be fairly obvious, though people seem to miss it all the time. If this were true, then there is nothing more universal about Shakespeare's work than the work of anyone else. Since the work of Harold Robbins or Jackie Collins also deal with all of these themes then we are forced to give the same status to these works as we are to Shakespeare. I am certain that if we taught the novels of Harold Robbins to high school students and we held Robbins in the same high regard as we do Shakespeare, those students would not only have an easier time understanding Robbins (making him, by the normal standard and by definition, more universal) but those students would hold the reputation of Robbins in the same high standard as we now hold Shakespeare. Another problem is this, one might rationally argue that certain human emotions are universal, but that does not mean that they are experienced or understood in the same way. A good, if melancholy, example of this is when we think about love. It is absurd to think, for example, that our highly personalized notions of love and marriage are experienced in the same way as, say, they are by people in an ancient farming society of arranged marriages undertaken largely for familial advantage. Shakespeare's notion of love as portrayed in Romeo and Juliette is, in fact, not only highly stylized and elitist but particularly Eurocentric.
The truth is that anyone who has been initiated into a certain kind of education and knowledge can easily get the impression that Shakespeare's work is uniquely "good" and universal. And though one can make an argument that everyone throughout time has experienced love, hate, jealousy, etc., how we process and understand those emotions and experiences is unique and related to our cultural and class worldviews. This is not to say that you can't read and interpret the works of Shakespeare in a particularly "universalist" way. The real problem is that such interpretive structures are imposed on students as the only coherent and meaningful way to think about Shakespeare or literature in general. Literary education is, at least at the high school level in North America, stuck in a kind of time warp of elitism and close-mindedness. And until we start opening our minds and attitude about what literature is and how we talk about it, students will continue to be alienated by the education system which relies on arbitrary and authoritarian views of education and literature.
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