It’s time to send the Bard back to school

FROM CURMUDGEON CENTRAL

I’m sorry. I can’t help myself. Black spots are clouding my vision … I’m feeling light headed and faintly sick … An attack of the dreaded curmudgeons is coming on … I’m powerless to resist …

Reading Shakespeare—which, admittedly, involves the ordeal of putting down the iPhone and picking up a book—one rapidly realizes how profound his influence on the English language has been.

While it’s true the Bard plundered the Book of Common Prayer for all manner of figures of speech, especially when he was in a rush, his personal contribution to our tongue is absolutely vast.

Indeed, one can hardly turn a page without encountering a phrase or saying which has been absorbed into every day parlance—or what, before the dawning of this present illiterate age, was everyday parlance.

Consider, for example, the following phrases picked at random from Macbeth: “sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care” … “daggers in men’s eyes” … “we have scorched the snake not killed it” … “blood will have blood.”

These, and hundreds of other figures of speech coined by Shakespeare, were grafted into the daily vocabulary not just of a highly educated elite, but of ordinary men and women throughout the English speaking world.

The breadth of the vocabularies of ordinary people was why it was such a pleasure to conduct what used to be known by folks in the news business as “vox pops.”

Vox pop is an irreverent newsman’s (uh! sorry, newsperson’s) abbreviation of the Latin expression “vox populi” which translates as “voice of the people.” (Today “vox pops” are usually called “person on the street interviews”—another politically correct genuflection towards the drastically declining erudition of folks in the media.)

In any event, 40 or so years ago, reporters sent out to quiz passers-by on the streets of America’s cities, towns, and villages on matters of the day could bank on notebooks full of quotes, remarkable for their aptness and eloquence.

Certainly, by no means all of them had a flawless command of English grammar, but a vast majority were able to express themselves with commendable precision and a considerable degree of eloquence.

Today’s “vox pops”, by contrast, are sorry affairs—stumbling and bumbling, and positively smattered with “likes” and “kindas” and “sortas.” Don’t look for enlightenment in today’s “vox pops.” Simply watch them and weep.

There is a very simple reason for the precipitate decline in the average American’s command of the English language. Shakespeare is no longer taught in our schools, except in the most bowdlerized forms.

The excuse is exactly the same as those offered for today’s inept Prayer Book revisions: Shakespeare’s English is old fashioned and too difficult for modern people to understand.

This is complete poppycock—unless you define “old fashioned” to mean that he uses a vocabulary far in excess of 1,000 words. Of this, he’s undoubtedly guilty. Shakespeare’s vocabulary logs in at about 24,000—dwarfing even the Prayer Book’s 16,000 and the King James Bible’s 20,000 or so.

But that’s the whole point of teaching Shakespeare to school kids. It vastly expands their vocabularies and teaches them to use their newly acquired word-power effectively, enabling them to communicate precisely, eloquently and with the nuance that’s needed to convey complex and sophisticated ideas.

The notion that Shakespeare is outmoded holds water only if one accepts the contention that mankind would be far better off if Western civilization were to go into a permanent decline.

There are, of course, a number of people in this country, including members of the educational establishment, who view such a prospect with approval. Restricting the ability of people to communicate is a surefire method of achieving such a lunatic goal. Civilization hangs, first and foremost, on the communication of ideas.

However, most of the folks who dismiss Shakespeare as outmoded and pointless are by no means iconoclasts.

Some subscribe to the notion that challenging children to master difficult subjects such as Shakespeare would subject them to unbearable levels of stress. Others seem to believe that the computer age has rendered Shakespeare’s style of communication obsolete.

Nonsense! My dad used to point out that if pictures really were worth a thousand words, people would still be drawing on cave walls.

But, who knows? If the anti-Shakesperians manage to maintain the upper hand, cave wall art might well be in for a big revival. GPH✠