Teaching Shakespeare in a Time of Hate (A.A. Joubin & L.S. Starks)
"Teaching Shakespeare in a Time of Hate" by Alexa Alice Joubin and Lisa S. Starks , from Shakespeare Survey 74 , is a remarkable essay, and refers quickly to another remarkable work, Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now , ed. Eklund and Hyman (Edinburgh, 2019). I say this in part because when I attended college (starting in 1976), a majority of English instructors would have preferred to bracket the question of ethics, or the need to teach ethics or justice in a particular social or political or cultural context. English literature, they might say, could deal with style and metaphor and theme and a host of other things we find in the texts, but assuming a need to confront the hate of the times with literature didn't seem among the priorities of the instructors. If that occurred on its own, fine, but other things might be discovered in the texts as well, so better to find where the texts were leading, first, and later, ...