Why Study Shakespeare?

Teachers are sometimes asked: “Why devote so much time and resources to works written so long ago—and so removed from our everyday understanding?” To this, we prefer to quote James Baldwin, (novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist), who left the United States for France in 1948 to escape racism in America. In Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare, he says:

“Every writer in the English language, I should imagine, has at some point hated Shakespeare, has turned away from that monstrous achievement with a kind of sick envy … I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression … But I feared him, too, feared him because, in his hands, the English language became the mightiest of instruments. No one would ever write that way again. No one would ever be able to match, much less surpass, him.”

Over time, Baldwin came to understand that “the language of Shakespeare revealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past.” And that Shakespeare, the “greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people … by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.”

We invite you to get to know Shakespeare. Take a look below at some of our free digital resources, and contact us to hear more about our offerings.