The Importance of Shakespeare to Inner City Students

A few months ago, an English professor took a group of unlikely actors under her wing and directed them in an emotionally affecting version of Shakespeare’s classic dramatic tragedy, >Hamlet: Prince of Denmark<. The actors were inmates of Missouri Eastern Correctional Center (MECC), an institution at which I myself taught for a year in the very early 1980s. Among the many affecting deliveries of lines that I heard via a National Public Radio account of that performance were the following, rendered by he who acted the part of Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle and murderer of
Hamlet’s father, the former king of Denmark:

…..Pray can I not;/ Though my inclination be as sharp as will:/ My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent…/ O wretched state! O bosom black as death!/ O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,/ Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay!/ Bow, stubborn knees; and heart with strings/ of steel, Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe!/ All may be well… [Retires and kneels]/ [Rising] My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Perfect sense it makes that such lines as these from one of the most psychologically rich plays ever written should resonate with those who have struggled with guilt, to be sure, but also with the vast array of emotions that unite us in our humanity: love strongly felt but impeded in fulfillment; betrayal by friends and family; duty strongly felt as necessary but falling short in execution; the paradox of noble humanity caught in existential loneliness; treachery successful as planned by the perpetrator but redounding to the demolition of that very perpetrator.

In listening to the inmates and how affected they were by the play, I was struck by how lamentable it is that Shakespeare is not better taught in our public schools. In my observation, too few teachers of English have the passion for Shakespeare that they themselves should have. Without that passion, they are hard-pressed to engage students with the sheer joy of literature at its best. Then, there tends to prevail among teachers a defeatist attitude whereby they do not think that students will like Shakespeare, even if the teacher herself or himself does understand the greatness and the pleasure in reading such a work as >Hamlet<. And so a great opportunity is wasted to present students with some of the most magnificent explorations of the human psyche ever to appear in print. The issues raised and the emotions explored are done to such striking effect that, properly taught, all students will respond to such a work as Hamlet.

So as I listened to the actors discuss their performances and the resonance of the lines for them personally, I had these thoughts about the wasted opportunity represented by the noted problems of classroom presentation of the material in our public schools. But I also had the thought that if these very inmates had received proper K-12 instruction in the literary beauty and psychological power of Hamlet, the experience might have served as an outlet for their own life frustrations, might have given them insight into their own daily struggles, might have provided them an alternative activity, whether in acting for the school drama club or in continuing to read great literature, that could have deterred them from the life of the street and the path to criminal behavior.

This jibes with my abiding conviction concerning the power of education to transform lives in multiple ways. In a highly practical sense, the more formal education one receives, the greater one’s earning power in the world of work. But just as importantly, education, as the transmission of subject area knowledge across a broad and deep liberal arts curriculum, gives a person a sense of one’s own power in the world. Possessed of broad knowledge, a person can act comfortably and effectively in a great variety of situations; understand a breadth of contemporary issues in considerable detail; make reasoned judgments about events currently unfolding across the great, wide world; and responsibly exercise the great privilege of citizenship in a democracy.

I have seen the study of Shakespeare animate my own students, awakening them to the serious consideration of vital human themes, and giving them the confidence that if they can read and understand the Bard, they can comprehend any reading matter put before them. I know that in many, many cases, this sort of attitude toward the world of knowledge has deterred my inner city students from unseemly activities and given them a better way of viewing themselves in the world. For not a few, this means that they have avoided the fate of those who ended up in Missouri Eastern Correctional Center.

And while I am happy for my students, I also fervently wish that the K-12 experiences of those inmates had given them a greater sense of Shakespeare in particular, a better education in general, and a better fate along the pathways of their one earthly journey.