A Diatribe Against Laziness in English

You may have seen something called “No Fear Shakespeare” in the Shakespeare section of your local bookstore. These ‘editions’ of Shakespeare have the original text on one side and the ‘translated’ text on the other side. In my one week’s experience of teaching Shakespeare, I’ve found that these “No Fear” editions have accomplished the exact opposite.

Students fear Shakespeare because they do not understand the language with which he speaks. As a freshman in high school, I struggled to understand the Bard’s early modern English and subsequently the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. My teacher walked us through it scene by scene, and we were able to make the first halting steps toward comprehension. I have done the same thing with my Drama I students (most of whom have already studied Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in their English classes), yet they aren’t even familiar with the abbreviated words (flow’r, o’er), or the common words ‘doth,’ ‘wast,’ ‘wilt;’ some even trip over more familiar archaic language like ‘thee,’ and ‘thou.’ How can they be completely unfamiliar with the language if they have indeed studied Shakespeare in English? No Fear Shakespeare. They haven’t read Shakespeare, they’ve something 'translated' into modern language, void of the language which makes Shakespeare Shakespeare.

Why should we even study Shakespeare if we aren’t studying SHAKESPEARE? One doesn’t read Shakespeare for plot, since many of his stories were recycled from mythology and folktales. We read Shakespeare for the poetry, for the way he molded the words and images to capture his audience’s imagination. We study Shakespeare because he was able to hold the attention of the uneducated groundlings that attended his plays for hours on end. We study Shakespeare, because even after four readings of the same text, I'm still discover something new each time. Do you really think Romeo and Juliet is famous because of its tired and worn out plot (which, by the way, had been done before)? No, it’s because Juliet said, “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" Sure, the story is timeless, but I almost think Leonard Bernstein did it a little better in the 1950s when he set it to music.

Furthermore, using No Fear Shakespeare as a class tool has taught the students that it's okay to let someone else do the work for them. We don't give students the answer in math class, why should we do the same thing in English? Shakespeare is like any difficult problem, it takes time to learn it, but once learned the concept is the building block for bigger and better things. The skills I learned from doing close readings of Shakespeare have proved invaluable to me as I went to other classes, and into my job now.

Finally, No Fear Shakespeare sends the wrong message to students about themselves. Handing them a pre-solved puzzle is like saying, I'm sorry, you're not smart enough to understand this for yourself, you need someone older to tell you what's going on. All of this isn't to say that there is no place for No Fear Shakespeare. I can see how it would be beneficial to show students that this is English, and that they can draw parallels to the language as we speak it today. It might provide a good starting point for students, a model of how they might go about understanding it for themselves. But how are people supposed to learn and grow as human beings if they face no challenges to their intellect? How are they to get past a 7th grade reading level if we keep giving them the dumbed down version of one of the greatest writers of the English language? Quit taking the easy way out in education. It won't do anyone good.