Pop culture Shakespeare.

Shakespeare wrote for the ages,
but not specifically for us.
He didn’t know us.
And, apparently,
we don’t know him.

He didn’t envision our problems
driving on the freeway
so he’s not up to date
not in our world
not relevant
can’t speak to us.

Hamlet now:
Am I
or ain’t I?
Do I be
or don’t
or should?
What the hell!
Gimme a break!



To quote Jeffrey R. Wilson, referenced in Zocalo, Sep. 20, 2020:
“Hamlet is a suicide text – it’s time to teach it like one.”


“These choices give students the power to refuse the deference we are trained to give to this author . . . we can reject, look askance at, accept wholly or in part . . . we all can choose whether we want to eat this particular literary spinach. . . .” -Lee Emrich, Zocalo, April 29, 2024.



I weep at the loss. I cry for those who have missed Shakespeare and don’t know what they’ve missed.

I just read the article in Zocalo, April 29, 2024, touting Pop Culture Shakespeare. Current trends to pander, pretending Shakespeare is the story, not the words. To adapt, modernize, make relevant, palatable, is to adjust the stories which are not his to begin with. By giving this treatment to his sources, we leave him out of the equation. When students struggle with the plays, don’t relate, don’t like them because they are trying to follow what’s going on, and then we clarify the narrative so they can follow the story, they don’t experience Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the words. If we don’t realize that, we don’t experience him either, his art, the reason he holds pre-eminence at the high water mark of the English language. He’s fleshed out the bare bones of a borrowed story, but if we only have the bones, we leave hungry.

West Side Story is not Romeo and Juliet. It’s the story adapted. It stands on its own, speaks to us in our language. Shakespeare’s language demands work. We need to learn our English language so we can read poetry that goes beyond the literal, the low level of straight line narrative. We need to free our minds and ears and emotions to follow complexity and diversity and nuance and implication and metaphor, and all the things language can do when it stretches. If we read a comic book, we may get the basic story, but not the real thing, the presence of literature. We’re missing out and don’t know what we’re missing.

When our excited teachers give us pretended pandered relevance as broth, to make it easy to swallow, we’ve missed the meal, the banquet, the feast. We as teachers need to be self-reflexive enough to evaluate our own ability to taste and digest. Otherwise we accommodate ourselves and promote and help create a diminishing world of loss from which we may never recover, if what is lost stays lost, and none of us knows what we’re missing.