Wednesday 23 March 2005

Shakespeare's Sinister

Teresa over at Making Light makes an interesting observation:
There is one striking point of similarity between the Columbine and Red Lake shootings: in both cases, the students were reading Shakespeare when the firing broke out. It’ll be interesting to see whether school districts across the country propose a ban on Shakespeare, the way they tried to ban black clothing in the wake of Columbine.

They should. Cos you know if they outlaw Shakespeare only outlaws will read him. And literacy will, er, shoot up.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So which school in the US DOESN'T read Shakespeare?

Paul said...

I don't know if there are any that don't, yet. I guess all the difficult language makes it more boring than titillating for most students and their parents.

Once they find out just about everything Mercutio says is "bawdy", ("O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified" after talking about Romeo's empty "roe" is quite disgusting in my opinion) then things'll change...