The Samohi sits down with The Bard, William Shakespeare

Chelsea BrandweinManaging EditorIf the name William Shakespeare doesn’t start your neurons frantically firing off, I don’t know what does. Shakespeare was not just a playwright. Shakespeare is a language. Shakespeare is Latin for those who don’t want to conjugate. His plays and sonnets may require a trip to Sparknotes here and there and a thorough watching or two of “10 Things I Hate About You” (loosely based on The Bard’s “The Taming of the Shrew”) but let’s face it, Shakespeare’s works are Lay’s chips for the masses. You can’t read just one.The plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare have been a major part of Samo English classes’ curriculum for some time now. But why have we continued to study these works even though they were penned over four hundred years ago?In an article for the “Oxford University Press” entitled “Why Study Shakespeare?” Shakespeare scholar and professor at the University of Birmingham, Stanley Wells, addresses this very question.“Shakespeare is worth studying because reading his plays and poems [shows] us that other people may experience emotions that we find in ourselves, thus giving us a sense of shared humanity,” Wells wrote.Like Wells, many Shakespeare fans and professors cite The Bard’s over-arching themes and their parallels to modern-day as the main reasons for continuing to study his plays and sonnets.Samo English teacher Chon Lee, who has recently revived the Shakespearean Literature class, a senior English elective, agrees that the themes Shakespeare weaves flawlessy throughout his works are like type-O blood for humankind.“Love is still love. Betrayal is still betrayal. Death is still death,” Lee said. “Regardless of time or setting or geography, these themes still ring true.”Senior Gabby Villagomez, one of Lee’s Shakespeare Literature students, agrees.“Shakespeare has had a lasting impact on me because his work is timeless and can be read by and related to any generation,” Villagomez said. “No matter how old you are, Shakespeare has written something to apply to you.”Another argument as to why Shakespeare is so eternal is the belief that his literature has shaped the modern man.As American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Harold Bloom, writes in his “New York Times” bestseller “Shakespeare: The Invention of The Human,”“Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us.”English teacher John Harris shares Bloom’s theory.“I think that Shakespeare enlightened us about the potential of our own humanity and provided us a road map to our complexities, our paradoxes and our promises,” Harris said.In the same “Oxford University Press” article, Wells also wrote that Shakespeare’s works have an ability to transport us to another date and place in time. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” takes us down the cobblestone roads of then-modern-day Athens, Greece and next into the forest where nymphs and sprites reside. “Hamlet” lugs us to the “rotten state of Denmark” and the king’s court where the ghost of the late king haunts the grounds. And “Much Ado About Nothing” sends us on horseback to the lush outskirts of Florence, Italy.“[Shakespeare] touches on very basic categories that everyone can relate to but he does it so exquisitely that he paints a magnificent picture in the reader’s head,” senior Alex Smolentsev said.On every corner of the campus, teachers and students are illuminating these magical settings.Lee’s Shakespearean Literature class reads a total of nine plays over the course of the year. Each unit, they read and analyze a tragedy and then a comedy which share a common theme. For example, the class read “Hamlet” and then “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” respectively, and analyzed the play within a play phenomenon that stems throughout both works.Lee also makes it a point to show the class clips from movie adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays to analyze the effectiveness of the film directors’ choices. Additionally, to add another layer of dimension to the class, Lee has his students act out significant plot-enhancing scenes from each work.Harris has a similar approach. In fact, both his English 12 Advanced Placement (AP) class and his Folktales and Mythology class are touched by Shakespeare.In his English 12 AP class, Harris has his students read and analyze “Hamlet” and then in small groups dissect, discuss and perform from memory an assigned scene.According to Harris, their class discussions specifically focus on the tragic elements of the play and how they relate to the Aristotelian model.Harris’ Folktales and Mythology class reads “Pyramus and Thisbe” from Ovid’s Metamorphosis and because this tale plays a major role in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Harris shows his class the cock-eyed attempt at the tragedy by the Mechanicals in an adaptation of the play.Shakespeare was once described by a rival playwright as a “Johannes factotum” or in translation, a “Jack of all trades” and Shakespeare fanatics believe he more than earned this title.“He has given us such a breadth of genres from comedies to romances to tragedies to semi-tragedies,” Lee said. “He has provided us not just with memorable lines and phrases, but full, flushed-out, three-dimensional characters from Juliet to Cordelia to King Lear. It’s remarkable.”cbrandwein@thesamohi.com