ABSTRACT
As a teacher of introductory college literature courses and Shakespeare courses for adult learners, I have heard a great deal about students’ reactions to Shakespeare. I begin any course or unit on Shakespeare by soliciting information about which plays the students have already read, under what circumstances, what their reactions were to those plays and if they have recently read or viewed any Shakespeare for their pleasure, that is, outside formal school settings. Beyond the usual one or two students who really care about literature, the typical reactions reveal several things: first, that the middle school and high school presentation of Shakespeare is largely limited to the page. Few students ever get the chance to read scenes aloud, let alone actually participate in the production of a Shakespeare play. Second, students usually read only tragedies and histories (Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet), which seem to have bored them to death, and they cannot recall any themes which they related to, nor do they feel that those works were in any way entertaining to read. Third, they all claim—adults too—that Shakespeare’s language prevents them from reading the plays for pleasure just as it precluded their enjoyment of them in grade school. Fourth, it emerges that they know very little if anything about Elizabethan culture, theater, or Shakespeare’s life. All of these symptoms amount to a condition I, almost jestingly, diagnose as “Shakes-phobia.”
