Shakespeare for Christians?

Question from a reader:
I took Miss A to see a production of Twelfth Night tonight. Last semester, we went to a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream which was put on by a Christian homeschool group. This, too, was by a homeschool group - though not a Christian group.

After reading the story, where people are falling in love with people of the same sex because of disguises, etc, I felt uncomfortable with the story. I didn't really find it that funny. Then, this group had some not-so-modest outfits, sad some bad words, and made some rude gestures.

I'm wondering why, as Christians, we are trying to introduce Shakespeare to our children. They are definitely not Godly stories. I know the language is deep and we will always come across references to his plays, but I'm just wondering at what cost?

My response (which is rather candid and sort of rambling)
Did you happen to read this article?
http://childlightusa.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/do-electricians-need-shakespeare-by-jennifer-spencer/

I thought she did a really good job at summing up overall why we introduce our children to lots of different things. When I read this article yesterday out loud to my husband, we actually had a long discussion about Shakespeare. Too funny that you wrote this morning asking me about his writing. :)

Anyway, we take very seriously the responsibility to limit the exposure our children have to unhealthy and potentially spiritually damaging influences. We decided that Shakespeare is something we wanted to expose our children to first as good literature and then as the basis for being culturally literate. So much is spoken of and compared to Shakespeare in even the most basic of college courses that we felt we would be doing a disservice to our children if they didn't have at least a working understanding of his plays or an exposure to what all the hoopla was about.

That said, we started off with very sanitized versions of the most popular plays like Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. That was "good enough" for a long time.

Then when I started digging deeper into Charlotte Mason's ideas, I decided to refresh my memory with a few of the deeper plays that I had read in high school. I could not read them easily. I found that I had to listen to the audio books in order to make sense of it. There is a certain way to read Shakespeare that I think makes you overall a better reader.

Now to your question. Should Christians read Shakespeare?

This is something you will need to decide for your family. I have come to the conclusion that even though the apparent themes may be un-Christian, the morals are there. The bad guys get it in the end....mostly. The good guys triumph....mostly. The twists and turns explain much of the conflict with values. Here is an article that Jimmie links to on her Shakespeare Squidoo Lens that I read and enjoyed when I was thinking about the things you are thinking about now:
http://www.berith.org/hsres/shak/shak01.html

To your specific situation with the Twelfth Night production....I say it may be that they were not faithful to the original intent and acted it in such a way to play up the boy-boy/girl relationship. The written page does not portray this is a weird boy/boy relationship at all but just a mistaken identity. It is funny in the book and you are relieved at the end when all is revealed. It is not uncomfortable at all. In fact when we read this play earlier this year, my boys were fascinated by the fact that in Shakespeare's time that all actors were boys. So Viola would have been a male actor playing a girl who is now disguised as the man Cesario.

Finally, we are just now approaching some of the more deep and dark Shakespeare now that the boys are a little older. We are tackling Hamlet next week. After that we are going to work on Macbeth. Last year we did King Lear and it was actually very good. Bad guys=bad things, good guys=good things. We will probably pick one production to see sometime in the next year when we can find an appropriate theater version. So many versions of Shakespeare in our area are "modernized" and they do play up the themes of boy/boy and are extremely dark. We will not see those.....Othello comes to mind.


We read Romeo and Juliet last year. This one we had really good discussions about the ending. Suicide is a deep subject. We actually spent some time on this aspect of the play and then decided what the real theme of the play was....it wasn't dying for love or some romanticized ideal of love either. This play was much more than that.

I love that we can talk and debate these things now that they are a little older. They have a grasp better on their Christian beliefs and we have discussed more adult ideas in the light of Bible scriptures as they have come up in our literature reading including Shakespeare. Sure, we could have just brought up the topic and talked about it, but tying their reading with scriptures and beliefs has made it more interesting and personal. They can see consequences of the character's actions.

I have saved some of my favorite Shakespeare plays for them to do as 12th graders. My absolute favorite is Merchant of Venice and since it has a twist at the end, I did not ever want to give it away in a children's version. The end is just too good.

This is the sort of a play that you could take as putting Christianity in a bad light, but you have to remember the time period. There was great antisemitism at that time, especially in some countries. We are going to use this as a discussion point comparing "the church" and real Christian values as laid down by Jesus.

There are great talking points within the Shakespeare plays about many Christian themes. These are things that you might like to share eventually with your daughter. Just sitting and watching a play will not be good enough. You will want to explore and talk and dig in with her side by side.

This is the beauty of homeschooling. We can look at seemingly un-Christian literature, art, music, historical ideas, world religions, and science and make sure that our children are not sheltered from wrong thinking but rather we show them how to hold things up to the light of truth and make informed decisions. Of course we wait until they are ready to handle the discussions and for our family this is something we have chosen to do in high school as we prepare them to face the world with a Christian worldview. They are going to be exposed to things that prick their conscience and we need to help them see how to handle it. Literature is just one vehicle to prepare them to read, discern, scrutinize, and then make informed decisions which are many times not popular. Literature courses were the worst place for my daughter in college. They were always a hotbed of ideas and wrong thinking. She had to many times stand alone with her beliefs.

Back to my boys, I always thoroughly research the production when we are going to see a Shakespearean play in person. I adored seeing Romeo and Juliet as a ballet in San Francisco. The music and the costumes were over the top awesome.


I would not hesitate to suggest the musical ballet after reading the book....Prokofiev rocks! There are so many things to love about Shakespeare and some really good stories that have a good point to them that I think lumping them all as un-Christian or unwholesome would be sad.

Do your research and make informed decisions. I do that with any literature. I just spent a better part of two weeks previewing and going through all of TOG's Year 4 literature and found some we will not be reading. I despise The Great Gatsby and no light of truth can change a really bad story. We are skipping a few others as well for the same reasons. But, with that said, we will be reading Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and using it to discuss some issues and themes that may be touchy. I pick and choose how and when to expose ideas and situations to my boys carefully and with my eyes as open as they can be.

We have struggled and come to grips with how we handle Shakespeare in our house and in our family. My husband and I both agree that it has been a great experience. Even before your email we had talked about some of the issues you brought up. Hope this helps you a little to start thinking about how you will handle Shakespeare in your home.

Sincerely,
Barb