
Shakespeare: the apex predator - diodorus
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/shakespeare-apex-predator/
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johan_larson
A work should have to meet three criteria to be included in a modern English
curriculum. 1. It should be an esteemed part of our common literary heritage.
2. It should be somehow complicated, to allow for sophisticated analysis. 3.
It should be a good model for the students' own writing.

Shakespeare's plays do just fine on the first two criteria. But the third is a
rather different matter. He wrote plays in spoken verse, a long-dead form. And
his English, after more than four hundred years, now sounds comically
forsoothly and old-fashioned to the point of needing annotations and
explanations. He sounds _old_ in a way that Twain and Dickens -- no spring
chickens, themselves -- do not. To write sort of like Billy Avon, today, is to
court mockery.

Given this deficiency, my inclination is to reduce the amount of Shakespeare
in the curriculum. In high school, we had to study one of his plays every
year. Cut that in half, replacing two of his plays with modern novels. There's
certainly no shortage of candidates. Mailer? Roth? Atwood? Plenty of fine
choices that are held in high esteem, admit of deep analysis, and serve as
good models for the students' own writing.

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davidgerard
It's a tricky one. The trouble is that Shakespeare is one of the two great
anchors of modern English, the other being the King James Version bible. You
can't be highly literate in English without knowing both, because so much
common phrasing and allusion is straight out of them.

(The trouble with the KJV is that it's hardly ever taught as a literary
source, only as a religious one, but that's a separate rant. And if I wanted
to fix it I should become an English professor and teach it for a year to
prove my point.)

~~~
mrkstu
The only time in High School that the Bible was mentioned was my AP English
class, when we studied the Book of Job. It was a bit of a shock, after all
that time learning English, to suddenly be confronted with Scripture at
school... but refreshing.

The KJV was definitely THE source of common culture in America, up until the
last ~30 years or so. It has been sad to see the rapid decline in Biblical
scholarship by the average American. Having a common touchstone of such
breadth/depth/complexity being replaced by Disney/Marvel as the common lexicon
has been disheartening (despite my love of all things Marvel.)

~~~
davidgerard
It's still the source for many of the sources. So many phrases are straight
from there, much as they are from Shakespeare. Martin Luther King leaned
heavily on Exodus, and the theme of "let my people go".

