I covered a ninth-grade English class the other day and they were reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The students were on Act 2, scene 4, and I asked for volunteers to read the different parts. Now it’s been a minute since I’ve read Shakespeare—it’s really not my thing—but I was interested to see how this went, especially since I’m thinking about getting an ELA endorsement and working on a rap class “special project” (more to come later).
So they’re reading this “No Fear Shakespeare” edition which has the original text on the right-hand page and a contemporary “translation” on the facing page. What surprised me is just how… uh… crude some of the text is in the play (in its own old-timey sort of way). I photocopied some parts so I could share them with you.
MERCUTIO The pox of such antic, lisping, affecting fantasmines, these new tuners of accents! “By Jesu, a very good blade! A very tall man! A very good whore!” Why, is not this a lamentable thing, grandsire, that we should be thus afflicted with these strange flies, these fashion-mongers, these “pardon me’s,” who stand so much on the new form, that they cannot sit at ease on the old bench? Oh, their bones, their bones!”
The student struggled mightily trying to read this in any kind of convincing way. Most of the words are unfamiliar to them—both in meaning and pronunciation—the syntax is odd in some cases, and the sentences just don’t make immediate sense. (We’ll put aside the giggles that were stifled anytime a naughty word like “whore” came up). Let’s see what the “no fear” translation has to say:
MERCUTIO I hate these crazy, affected guys who use foreign phrases and newfangled expressions. I hate their strange manners and their weird accents! I hate it when they say “By Jesus, this is a very good blade, a very brave man, a very good whore.” Isn’t this a sad thing, my good man? Why should we put up with these foreign buzzards, these fashionmongers, these guys who say “pardon me,” these guys who care so much about manners that they can’t kick back on a bench without whining? “Oh, my aching bones!”
I’m not convinced that this helps much. I recognize and can pronounce more of the words for sure.
Later in the scene (this is from the “no fear translation”:
R: Excuse me, good Mercutio. I had very important business to take care of. It was so important that I had to forget about courtesy and good manners.'
M: In other words “important business” made you flex your buttocks.” (<—Mercutio implies Romeo’s business was sexual)
R: You mean do a curtsy?
M: You’ve hit the target, sir (<—this is sexual double entendre)
R: That’s a very polite and courteous explanation.
M: Yes, I am the pink flower—the master, of courtesy and manners.
R: The pink flower (<—”pink flower” suggests the female genitalia)
Like what in the world are these students reading? The original makes little sense (to me, an old white guy who happens to like old-timey things) and the translation isn’t all that helpful. The language and imagery gets worse and weirder as the scene goes on (and made me think back to my… inappropriate by today’s standards… eighth-grade English teacher). I got to thinking that there are a lot of rap songs (or really, pop songs in general) that operate in the same basic way.
I asked the students “Are you enjoying reading this"?” and was met with a resounding “no.” One said “we literally have no idea what’s happening in this book.” Another rather astutely noted that “we learned that Shakespeare made up a lot of these words so how are we supposed to know what they mean?” I posed the question to them (a class that was maybe half white students and half students of color, many of whom had participated in that morning’s multicultural assembly) “So why is it that we can read this, with all of its challenging language and crude imagery, but a song by, say…”
“Drake?” (a student had expertly filled in the blank) “would never make it into the school curriculum?”
I left it at that because it was a Friday afternoon in a room full of ninth graders who had just been reading about whores and pumps and pink flowers. But it got me thinking…
I was reminded of Carrie Fried’s 1996 study on differential responses to lyrics. Fried conducted an experiment in which she gave two groups of people the same set of lyrics from a song by the 1960s folk group The Kingston Trio. She told one group that the lyrics were from a country song and another group that the lyrics were from a rap song and asked the groups to rate their perception of how violent the lyrics were. Not surprisingly, the group that believed they were reading rap lyrics judged them much more harshly than those who thought they were looking at country lyrics, and Fried surmised that implicit racial bias was largely responsible.
I guess on the one hand this seems pretty self-evident: racial bias—public school’s white racial frame—is why we talk about Shakespeare and not Drake. But if they deal with basically the same subject matter in the same ways—we can certainly talk about allegory, rhyme, meter, double entendre, etc. in rap music just as we do in Shakespeare—then why can’t we teach them how to interpret the texts that they are already encountering on a regular basis? That seems to me infinitely more useful than revisiting crusty old stuff.
I should also put in a sentence here about how difficult something like Shakespeare must be for students that primarily speak a language other than English.
And for those of you who say things about the “timeless” and “universal” themes of Shakespeare… well, if the themes are so timeless and universal (I’m not entirely convinced they are, of course) then those themes will show up in more contemporary texts as well, one with a lower barrier of entry for our already struggling students.