Sometimes when I have exhausted my allotted column word count, I find I have more to say on the topic, and I tell myself that I’ll get back to that topic later.
But this time, I am building on my discussion of “getting to the bottom of things” by looking at that idea in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which has a character named Nicholas Bottom, who describes his own dream as “having no bottom to it.”
Wordsmith that he was, Shakespeare rarely missed the opportunity to offer a pun to an audience who loved that kind of wordplay. With that in mind let’s consider the play’s audience then and now.
In the last century, I taught a graduate level course, “Problem and Issues in the Teaching of English” to students who were getting master’s degrees in preparation for a career teaching high-school English. One such problem I chose to discuss was the virtually universal practice of having American teenagers read a Shakespeare play, usually something they could relate to like “Romeo and Juliet.”
Thematically that play’s focus on a doomed teenage romance makes abundant sense.
Except for the language.
That is my point. Shakespeare’s audience included large numbers of “groundlings,” poorer folks who could not afford seats. They stood, rather than sat, in a space immediately in front of the stage, so positioned that it would be difficult for them to toss items at the stage when they disliked some bit of action or dialogue, an act of disapproval that was commonplace.
The more refined folks sat in boxes above the stage — no fear they would toss anything at the players.
Shakespeare gave these groundlings a bit of visual humor they no doubt loved: For reasons space does not enable me to explain, Nicholas Bottom’s head is transformed into that of a donkey. The groundlings would have loved this action. But here is my point: Unlike today’s teens, the groundlings, almost uniformly illiterate, still understood the spoken language very well. Shakespeare wrote words that were processed by both the groundlings and the educated folks in their boxes above the stage.
However, American teenagers back when I taught that course, and no doubt now, find dealing with Shakespeare’s Elizabethan English a formidable challenge, a fact my grandson now in college confirms. One could, if one were so audaciously inclined, rewrite his language into contemporary prose, an absolutely awful idea. And yet exposing our teenagers to one of the glories of our shared literature seems necessary.
What to do?
A problem.
Our students should be exposed to Shakespeare in his own language. This language problem is not confined to Shakespeare. In college, I was taught the great Greek tragedies, such as “Oedipus Rex” in translation, and as a student of literature I have read other fundamental texts translated from French or Russian or German.
But Shakespeare is in a class by himself, not only because of his genius but because he does, in fact, write in English, albeit of a kind we struggle with nowadays. In my training in college as an English major, I learned to deal with Shakespeare’s English as well as the earlier and more challenging Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer and his “Canterbury Tales,” which is marvelous reading.
I don’t have an answer for the issue of Shakespeare in our secondary schools where he must be taught in his own language.
And I am not advocating for more college English majors who perforce, as did I, learned to deal with the language of both Shakespeare and Chaucer. We have enough English majors already, and they tend to be a troublesome lot, raising issues others would rather ignore.