Shakespeare Goes to School

In the previous chapter, I used Looking for Richard to demonstrate that these days it’s hard indeed to escape the pedagogical imperative, a contradictory formation in which the demand that the public find pleasure in Shakespeare is countermanded by a quasi-evangelical practice, emerging from a range of sites, in which Shakespeare is inalienable from pedagogical agendas. The classroom thus occupies a contradictory position: it is the presumable source of disaffection in the first place, yet at the same time it often affords the tacit structuration within which that disaffection is meant to be overcome. So it is only fitting that I dedicate a chapter to Shakespeare in the schools. My purpose, however, is not to show how disaffection arises, nor to advocate for other or better approaches to teaching the plays. Disaffection, where it exists, is overdetermined and is ineluctably, even dialectically, related to the widespread demand in American culture that Shakespeare constitute a universally lovable object. As such, it far exceeds the capacity of noncollegiate instruction for countering (although I do not concede that it needs to be countered): the school is its scapegoat as vehicle of transmission, not its source.