How New South Wales Teaches Shakespeare

Badly

Jun 07, 2023

If you’ve been reading

by my compatriot Greg Ashman, you’ll know that many popular approaches to teaching children are based on dubious theories and questionable studies.

But schoolteachers would never teach something wrong or misleading, would they?

To answer this question, let’s have a look at how teachers in New South Wales generally explicate Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Apart from the first scene, the story takes place on a remote island where Prospero – who learned magic in his library – lives with his daughter Miranda, and his two servants: Caliban, a savage inhabitant of the island, and Ariel, an airy spirit. Early in the play, Prospero explains to Miranda that he was formerly the Duke of Milan, but was ousted by his brother Antonio, and the King of Naples, Alonso. With his infant daughter, Prospero escaped on “a rotten carcass of a boat” to the island, where he has been living ever since, using his magical powers to keep Caliban and Ariel obedient. When a ship carrying Antonio sails nearby, Prospero conjures a storm (the tempest of the play’s title) which shipwrecks Antonio, Alonso, Ferdinand (Alonso’s son and heir), Sebastian (Alonso’s brother), Gonzalo (conventionally described as an “honest old counsellor”), and others. Prospero assures Miranda that with his “provision,” no harm came “to any creature in the vessel.”

Now, we’re only in Act 1 and the teachers already have some difficulties. I’ve marked countless essays on The Tempest, and the students – who attend schools charging more than twenty grand a term – must be repeating the mistakes of their teachers, because the same specious remarks keep appearing.

They argue that Prospero is metaphorically calling those men “creatures” because he wants to reduce them to the status of animals so that he can better enslave and exploit them. But the word “creature” can refer to a man, or, even more simply, anything created. Later in the play, falling in love with Miranda, Ferdinand calls her a “precious creature.” How the teachers explain this is not entirely clear. (I’m sure the day will come when one of them will argue that Ferdinand has an interest in bestiality.)

An even bigger problem is the teachers’ ignorance of the literary tradition they’re meant to hand down. They claim that Shakespeare’s play indirectly supports “colonialism,” an idea consistent with “Renaissance values,” as can be seen in Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals.”

This argument has pretty much everything wrong with it. Prospero is hardly a coloniser: he’s a political exile who wants to get off the island. He does indeed call Caliban a “slave,” and torments him, but claims that he befriended Caliban until the savage tried to rape Miranda:

“I have used thee,
Filth as thou art, with human care, and lodged thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honour of my child.”

Caliban doesn’t deny it:

“O ho, O ho! would't had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.”

Not content with misrepresenting Shakespeare’s play, the teachers’ argument garbles Montaigne’s work. Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne was a French writer whose marginal notes kept increasing until they became essays. A learned man with a wealth of personal experience, Montaigne is the perfect pub companion, and the word “essay” doesn’t do justice to his conversational tone and his store of anecdotes. I was delighted to see him appear in my students’ essays. I was disheartened to see what they had done with him.

I’ve been reading Montaigne since I was a teen, and I taught myself French so I could read his essays in his own language. But even in English, it doesn’t take much work to understand the argument in “Of Cannibals” – most of the time, what we consider savage is simply stuff we’re not used to. After a brief digression about the discovery of the New World, he writes:

“Or je trouve … qu'il n'y a rien de barbare et de sauvage en cette nation, à ce qu'on m'en a rapporté, sinon que chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n'est pas de son usage; comme de vrai il semble que nous n'avons autre mire de la verité et de la raison que l'exemple et idée des opinions et usances du pays où nous sommes.”
Now, I find there’s nothing barbarous or savage in this nation, as I’ve been told; it’s that everyone calls barbarism whatever is not their practice. Just as, really, it seems that we have no other gauge of truth and reason except the example and idea of the opinions and practices of the country we live in.

Noting the violence and cannibalism found in these New World societies, he writes:

“Je ne suis pas marri que nous remerquons l'horreur barbaresque qu'il y a en une telle action, mais ouy bien de quoi, jugeant bien de leurs fautes, nous soyons si aveugles aux nôtres.”
I’m not angry when we note the barbaric horror in such an act, but I am angry when, correctly judging their faults, we’re so blind to our own.

Montaigne spends a fair bit of time praising the cultures that have kept a “natural” way of life, uncorrupted by European influences. His essay almost certainly did influence Shakespeare’s play – not in the depiction of Prospero but in the language of Gonzalo’s speech about his proposed utopia, a perfect society which excludes trade and education and even agriculture:

“I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty…
All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.”

The “noble savage” myth can be as distorting and demeaning as any, but note that the argument against “Eurocentrism” is itself a theme of European literature. The screed against the “colonialism” of The Tempest doesn’t reflect the play itself, but the current cant of the academy, where Edward Said’s influential but shoddy book Orientalism is something of a sacred text. Since the arrival of that polemic, dons and administrators – lacking even a skerrick of Said’s erudition – prattle about the value of diverse viewpoints while cutting programmes in languages and religions. These people don’t even read French!

The orientalists of the European empires did the hard work of learning languages such as Arabic, Hindi, Sanskrit, Japanese, Urdu. Today’s students, wise in the ways of the world, read postcolonial theory written in English at American universities. How many of them know the difference between a Sikh and a Sufi?

Our education system promotes a phony cosmopolitanism. Diversity and inclusion aren’t priorities anywhere outside of Western Europe and the Anglosphere. Corporations promote multiculturalism and immigration because it gives them a source of cheap labour. By contrast, a real interest in other cultures must involve dedicated study of their languages and religions – two subjects that are becoming increasingly less attractive every day. Languages are too hard. Religion is too boring.

But you can’t understand any civilization without reference to its religious foundations, on which are built the artistic, social, and intellectual life of a society. Unlike the mind-trapping, cynical platitudes of the multiculturalists, religions can’t be reduced to vapid stereotypes. Religions are poems, as Les Murray said. Listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and you’ll realise how shallow and smug today’s critics are, and how little they have to offer.

But if our teachers can’t even read English properly, how likely is it that young people will make the effort to develop a genuine global outlook?

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