[ID: Screenshots of a Facebook post from user Advocatus Peregrini, which reads:
I was conversing with a fully-grown adult a few days ago,
born and educated in the USA, who let this little gem drop:
“Well, it’s like Shakespeare said, “Love conquers
all!”“
I pointed out that Shakespeare never said that, Virgil did,
(Eclogues X) and Chaucer after him (Canterbury Tales.)
She said, “Oh I’m sure Shakespeare said that. In Romeo
and Juliet!”
I sighed. I’ve been in that play several times, in different
roles, and even directed it. That text does not occur in it.
But the real grind-my-teeth moment here was that if Romeo
and Juliet can be said to have a message, it is most certainly not “Love
conquers all,” seeing as the lovers die by their own hands with a trail of
their friends and relations’ corpses in their wake.
Neither this fact, nor the fact that I knew the play, nor my
explanation that Virgil and Chaucer used the phrase long before Shakespeare’s
birth dented her determination that “Love conquers all” came from
Shakespeare.
“You don’t know ALL the versions!” she protested.
All the versions?
Alternative Bard?
With every instinct screaming at me to let the matter drop,
warning me that some horror that will not soon be absent from my nightmares
waited around the next corner of this conversation. I pressed on.
It was a decision I was soon to regret.
I asked when she had first read “Romeo and
Juliet.” She said she had only read it once, when she was in Junior High.
In the version she was taught, Romeo and Juliet survive, are reconciled with
their parents, and are married in the church with their friends Mercutio and
Tybalt arm in arm in the wedding party.
“Help me into some house, Benvolio, or I shall
faint.”
It turned out that her school had their own
“version” of Romeo and Juliet, with an “uplifting” ending.
This was printed and distributed by a religious education publisher. And it was
the only version of the story that she had ever read. Of course she had HEARD
other people say that the story was a tragedy, but she just assumed they were
wrong.
And she did not see why MY version of Shakespeare should be
considered better than HER Shakespeare, which, after all, had a much more
wholesome ending.
I explained, in vain, that “my” version is
definitive because Shakespeare actually wrote it (quiet, you Oxfordians. Don’t
make me stop this car) and the message of the play – that when adult
stubbornness meets youthful impulsiveness tragedy ensues – is lost in the
ersatz, happy-clappy ending.
She said the ending that had been Frankensteined onto
Shakespeare’s play by the “Christian Education” publisher was better
than the original ending, “if the ending is as sad as you say it is.”
At this point, I concluded that this was a person who
deserved to go through the rest of her life “…safest in shame! being
fool’d, by foolery thrive!” I bid her adieu.
After the conversation, I wondered, darkly, if that was to
be the fate of Shakespeare, and all other literature if the happy-clappy people
get their way – as harmless and “uplifiting” as a cheerleader’s
chant.
I wondered what these bowdlerizers would do with
“Hamlet?” or worse, “Titus Andronicus” or “MacB-”
Nothing wholesome, I’m sure. Oh, that’s right, what they can’t appropriate,
they ban. Or burn.
In trying to protect children, we leave them undefended from
“…the slings and arrows” that life will no doubt throw their way.
Shakespeare raises the issues of tragedy – the fatal flaw, the last turning,
the role of fate, as well or better than any author before or since. He is a
gentle tutor, much to be preferred over that stern and dangerous teacher,
Experientia Inopinatum.
But, as ever, it really isn’t about the children. It’s about
the adults, and their desire to avoid answering difficult questions from agile
young minds, who know no fear and swarm like eager flies around questions that
have been boggling our best minds for millenia. To answer the questions that
literature raises, you have to have thought deeply about them yourself. And
that is something that few dare to do.] end id
Discussion ¬