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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There's definitely cringeworthy material within Shakespeare. It does include colonialism, slavery, racism, monarchy, murder, betrayal, suicide, elder abuse, war crimes, witches and monsters. I mean, not thinking too hard here, those are things you want to not just casually jump into with kids. Also, love, fairies, twins, and mistaken identities, but yeah, get kids ready for what they're gonna read.

It's great literature. It's also hard for most people to understand even if philologists and historians group it with modern English. I frankly think most English majors struggle with grasping every word, so people with a vocabulary mismatch - not scaffolded up to it or coming from another language background - are going to seriously struggle.

Shakespeare is also not the only way to teach concepts of drama. The "canon" is bigger than one playwright or time period; Americans have been writing plays for 300 years. If there are easier alternatives, they are not wrong for the context.

But who knows. Double, double toil and trouble; comments burn and trolls bubble.
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Shakespeare is not cringeworthy material but your sophomoric analysis is, and it belongs to a fraternity keg party. There were so many good comments on the thread about why to read Shakespeare, you completely missed them. As it was mentioned, it is about the core of the English vocabulary, the command and use of the language and character development, it's about the outsized influence he had on later literary work. Hard or easy to read, it doesn't matter, English literature class is not for Harry Potter or Wimpy Kid. If you think Shakespare is about the items you just enumerated... facepalm! [/quote]

Shakespeare is about the things I talked about above. And there are other things to teach. Shakespeare is GREAT. I love it. But it’s also all of the above. Macbeth, Richard III, Lear, Coriolanus, Henry IV, Romeo and Juliet? I mean- there are heavy themes. Get kids ready for them. Also we have centuries of additional literature and drama! This is not a holy book of a religion! This is one thread in a huge tapestry![/quote]

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