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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What’s the value of Shakespeare in the curriculum? Is it for your nostalgic reasons? Just because it’s always been done, does that mean it’s always been right? Do you want to still teach Columbus as a savior and hero?[/quote]

What an astoundingly ignorant comment (from someone who has probably never read Shakespeare, I’m guessing). Maya Angelou said that “Shakespeare must’ve been a black girl” because his words spoke to her soul. Great literature speaks to us all.

From the Atlantic:

Angelou explained how as a young girl who once read (with no claim, necessarily, to understanding) every book in the tiny library in Stamps, Arkansas, she thought that the author of Sonnet 29 must have been a black girl because its solemn words expressed so fiercely what she—an outcast, the victim of racism, destitution, and childhood sexual abuse, crying out alone before a deaf heaven—felt inside:

When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least.
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

And when Angelou recited them to us, these words sounded indeed like they had sprung forth from her soul.[/quote]

It also speaks to the ability of Shakepeare to capture teen experiences like no other. [/quote]

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