Elizabethan music is terrible and dated. It should not be associated with Shakespeare’s plays. 

A few nights ago I tried to watch a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Before the play started, period-dressed musicians performed a jaunty English folks song with recorders and harpsichords. They were talented and well rehearsed. The overall atmosphere they conjured, though, was the soundtrack to getting your glasses snapped in half by a bully. Completely out of the mood, I turned off the TV before Falstaff even wandered on-stage. Who enjoys this archaic noise? Classical music is what NPR plays as filler when they can’t afford a more expensive show. Yes, recorders and harpsichords are period-appropriate, but that doesn’t mean they should share any part of the stage with Shakespeare’s dramatic inventions, unless we’re going to make everything about the production accurate to the less socially refined times in which Shakespeare lived (all-male actors, only rich people got to sit down to watch the play, scant personal hygiene). Elizabethan music coats Shakespeare’s transcendent works in a thick layer of dust. If you have to have music associated with your production of a Shakespeare play, why not find emotionally appropriate songs that will connect with the audience?

With this agreed upon, I humbly request a new tradition for April 23, in which all lutes, recorders, harpsichords, and Elizabethan scores are summarily piled high and torched. 

Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1997) is overrated.        

It is indeed “opulent” and “epic”, but when The Norton Anthology recommended this full-text, 241-minute production of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, they seem to have minimized the value of what I consider a very important component of a film or play: the actors. Branagh (the name is Celtic for “ham”) mugs for the camera at every opportunity. His choices behind the camera aren’t any more subtle. The film is packed with quick cuts and lurid visual effects, which haven’t aged too well over the past two decades. I can appreciate the spectacle and the excess, but even when I watched it in high school I remember thinking — it was around the time the earth literally started splitting apart when the ghost of Hamlet’s father appeared before him — this is a little much. Why is this production held as the touchstone of Hamlet films? Is it because he cuts nothing from this play, a play that has always, even since its very first production, been cut for time? Is it because the quantity of A-list actors, many of whom (Jack Lemon, Robin Williams) turn in performances that are only acceptable if compared to a high school production. 

Watch the 2010 David Tennant/Patrick Stewart version instead. Or the Laurence Olivier classic, which I avoided for too long because I heard it was dreamy and dated, but still holds up quite well. Or the Russian Gamlet.       

Or watch the Branagh version, if it’s the one that suits your (lack of) discerning taste. Don’t tell me it’s the best, though. 

Hamlet should not be taught to high schoolers

Or, if it is taught, it should be the final play in a sequence that allows students to appreciate what makes it so weird and widely-studied five hundred years later. Everything that makes the play great — psychologically complex soliloquies that show a character forming their ideas in real time, the inscrutable machinations of the title character, the horrific spectacle of the conclusion — stands in contrast to Shakespeare’s preceding masterpieces, like Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, both parts of Henry IV, and Henry V. In these plays, characters speak to the audience, but they are always confiding — we don’t get to witness the poetry of their deliberation (one of the reasons “To be or not to be” was such a watershed moment in literature). In these plays, the behavior of the characters was sometimes surprising, but it always made dramatic sense. There are, conservatively, half a dozen plot holes in Hamlet. Some of them might be the result of revision and folio printing errors, but some of them are deliberately and bizarrely left unanswered by Shakespeare. Is Hamlet acting insane, or does he really lose his mind? This cryptic equivocation can’t be appreciated by a reader who hasn’t experienced more conventional works where all the important questions are answered. High schoolers hate plot holes. And I don’t blame them for their frustration at why Hamlet suddenly ages a decade midway through the play, or why Hamlet is just finding out about Ophilia’s death at her graveside. I have no answers for them. In my opinion, these plot holes are best analyzed when held against Shakespeare’s more conventional and more tightly wound works. 

And then there’s the ending, in which all the principal characters are left dead except for Horatio. Many of Shakespeare’s preceding works were filled with violence (Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus x 100), but none had ever concluded with such nihilism, which Shakespeare would top later in his career with King Lear (imagine teaching that to high schoolers). Every time I have tried to teach Hamlet, students have always been bemused by the ultraviolence of the ending. There’s always a spoken or unspoken sentiment: we spent four weeks building up to this? I worry that for that for many students, that’s their lasting impression of a Shakespearean tragedy: everyone is dead at the end, to no one’s satisfaction.        

Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Macbeth: all tragedies that allow a high schooler to marvel at Shakespeare’s genius without experiencing the frustrations that occur when reading Hamlet out of context.   

Falstaff deserves more time with high schoolers 

Sir John is Shakespeare’s greatest comic character, and yet from my observation he is almost never used in high school curriculum. I wonder if it’s because the plays he appears in are depict English history, which at first blush seems too daunting to most teachers. I’m not sure what the reason is, but I do know that if a comedy is taught in high school, it is usually A Midsummer Night’s Dream — which is a fine play but not that funny to high schoolers — or The Taming of the Shrew — which is funny to high schoolers, for all the wrong reasons. 

Falstaff, on the other hand, is a walking (waddling) figure of appetites, of desire run to excess. He’s the fat Socratic devil on Hal’s shoulder in the Henry IV plays, always ready for more drink, love, and scamming. In my small sample of experience teaching 1 Henry IV, students were intrigued by him while identifying with Hal’s coming-of-age conflict.    

So teach the Henry IV plays. Kids will like them. Or teach The Merry Wives of Windsor, which I finally read this spring and was surprised at how much it rose above its reputation as Shakespeare’s worst comedy. It’s probably his least intellectual comedy, but I’d go so far to say that it’s probably one of his funniest. If nothing else, it would make a great play to teach in a classroom, where the screwball scenes can be acted out and the outrageous accents can be appreciated.  

Thank you for reading and agreeing with my opinions. I hope you take some time today to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday/deathday. If you need recommendations…

• Watch some of Paul Cantor’s lectures on the politics of Shakespeare
• Read one of James Shapiro’s great books about two seminal years in Shakespeare’s life: 1599 and 1606
• Watch an online production of one of Shakespeare’s work performed by the great American Shakespeare Center down in Staunton. 
• Read Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt, a great work of historical speculation that helps set his works into better context