“They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.” – “Love’s Labor Lost” by William Shakespeare.
If you have had the distinct pleasure of experiencing Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labor’s Lost” (with all its witty banter and woeful love poems) you might, much like me, be reminded of your yesteryears in a high school English class and wonder why this engaging Shakespearean comedy wasn’t included on the reading list.
“They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.” – “Love’s Labor Lost” by William Shakespeare.
If you have had the distinct pleasure of experiencing Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labor’s Lost” (with all its witty banter and woeful love poems) you might, much like me, be reminded of your yesteryears in a high school English class and wonder why this engaging Shakespearean comedy wasn’t included on the reading list.
Both quick-paced and full of humor, “Love’s Labor’s Lost” is a prime example of how timeless the art of sarcasm and mockery can be. The play’s central themes and motifs, moreover, maintain important parallels in today’s society, like the folly of young love and the frivolity of academic study without reason or application. An incredible balancing act of comedy and social criticism, “Love’s Labor’s Lost” gave me what I had been missing from my previous exposures to Shakespeare—liveliness to the ideas and character dialogue/interactions that could breach the linguistic and cultural barriers one faces as a modern reader.
Yet despite such deficiencies in the course readings, my high school English teachers still did an excellent job of hyping the much drier Shakespearean dramas we were assigned to read, which included “Romeo & Juliet,” “Macbeth,” and “Hamlet” among other such works. And as far as English classes in the U.S. go, these readings were pretty standard. As Jonathan Burton emphasizes in his article “Shakespeare in Liberal Arts Education,” a total of five plays (“Macbeth,” “Hamlet,” “Romeo & Juliet,” “Julius Caesar” and “Othello”) made up 90 percent of all the Shakespearean plays taught in a sample of 400 American high schools. Critically, these five plays account for a small fraction of the Bard’s diverse works, which total to 38 combined tragedies, comedies, romances and historical plays.
While the predominance of Shakespearean tragedy in U.S. high schools provides a poor representation of Shakespeare’s creative capacities, I am personally more concerned by the idolization of harmful romantic ideals and the prevalence of adolescent suicide in the literary works presented to our students. “Romeo & Juliet,” in particular, has become a unique cultural representation of deranged and devout lovers that is taught in almost every freshman English class. Yet our society’s preoccupation with this short-lived, “love” story of two suicidal teens throws into question our increasingly progressive cultural understanding of love and lust in that we still admire (referentially at least) the lover’s unrealistic and unhealthy relationship.
Nevertheless, understanding allusions to Shakespeare has always been a rite passage for younger generations, and on a personal level I would never argue for the complete removal of Shakespeare from the high school English curriculum. But with such variety in Shakespearean literature, perhaps it is time to try out some of the 33 other comedies, romances, tragedies, and historical plays that high school English teachers very seldom seem to touch. Personally, my vote goes for “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” but I have always been more a comedy kind of gal.
