Chapter 11 - Enduring the Eventual: A Virtuous Way of Reading Shakespeare

Summary

How can the act of reading Othello or Macbeth become virtuous? I ask this question as a Shakespearean at a liberal arts institution whose mission is to prepare students to lead an ethical life (not because my university's namesake is the island where Macbeth is buried). When it comes to Shakespeare in higher education, though, Iona University is not an outlier. Students might read one Shakespeare play, many English majors and some Education majors must take one Shakespeare course, and some elect to take two. Because most students encounter Shakespeare for small spans as undergraduates, my pedagogical goals are less informed by long-standing historical, archival or theoretical queries than they are by the very real possibility that many students are offered what might prove ‘the be-all and end-all’ of their Shakespeare experience, their last chance to dwell among a community of burgeoning Shakespeare readers who must struggle with the distinctiveness of Shakespeare's art – the poetics, the contexts, the performances and the implications.

Among my goals is to encourage students to experience Shakespeare's major works as ‘proper stuff’ for honing their emotional and mental faculties against any ‘perilous stuff / that weighs upon the heart’ in their future (Macbeth 3.4.61, 5.3.44–5). I hope that some students will absorb, resonate with and even internalise the discoveries that close reading Shakespeare affords them. Perhaps some will then peruse Shakespeare after graduation, when they will sadly but most likely encounter much of what Shakespeare makes profound through poesis and eventual performance, if they have not already – the often isolating human struggles and travails, the accompanying ambivalence, doubt, guilt, shame, anger, frustration, desperation and grief that may remain afterwards, perhaps during sleepless nights when thoughts haunt and sting like scorpions, in a world beset with social ills and ecological turmoil.

My standard scholarly approaches to Shakespeare seem ill suited for the task. Reading Shakespeare's Macbeth through a combination of textual analysis and contextualisation – that is, within its early Jacobean milieu – might not counter attempts to nudge students towards a more virtuous life, but it typically does not support those efforts either. Overviews of the Gunpowder Plot, fears over casuistry and the history of English Jesuits from Edmund Campion to Robert Southwell to Henry Garnet have never rattled readers to rethink who they are and how they ought to be in relation to others.