Shakespeare, the Holy Bible, and Watching Rocks Roll Downhill

I asked a fellow teacher, thirty-six years ago, "Do you know where I can find a novel study that contains close reading questions and discussion for the entirety of the piece, sort of like a concordance for the Holy Bible?"

It was Friday night after a football game. We were at a little town bar in a little Minnesota town where we both taught, enjoying a beer. The older gentleman with whom I was talking - we'll call him "Veteran Teacher" ("VT" for short) - doubled over in laughter. "What in God's name would you want that for?" he finally managed to say.

I must have a penchant for asking ridiculous questions. Another time, when I was traveling with a few guys on a country gravel road, I asked, pointing to the cracked, tilted rocks at the top of a hill in a pasture, "Have you ever seen one of those rocks up there tip over and suddenly start rolling down the hill all by itself?"

The other three fairly split their guts for about three full minutes.

During a lull, I asked, "I mean seriously, from erosion, spontaneously - a rock tips over, maybe in the rain, while you're watching, and you happen to see it. I'm just wondering if a guy might ever actually see it happen?"

One of them said, through titters, "So, when you do that, do you bring a lunch?" It was another twenty miles back to town, and they could not stop laughing.

Being the object of ridicule is difficult, but I guess, when you're a certain type of person, you get used to it. You need people to think you're just a little off, or just kidding around. They all gave me credit for a magnificent joke.

But back to the little bar: It was 1976. I was starting my second year in the classroom. VT and I were talking about teaching. I couldn't answer his question, so I restated what I thought was an obvious purpose for my work, "Well, you know, the Holy scriptures are frequently examined and read many times and interpreted with great care. I'm trying to train my students how to read and interpret all literature, for themselves, so they're ready for college."

This time, VT was able to restrain his laughter. "Son," he said, "these books ain't Holy, and you're not teachin' a group of kids matriculatin' to Yale." He spoke with a pleasant Southern lilt - I believe he was originally from Georgia. How he ended up in Minnesota, I couldn't tell you - "You're now an English teacher in a little Minnesota farm community. What you hope to do here is build familiarity with literature. You're educatin' future farmers, carpenters, and truck drivers. They're good kids, but when they're done with school, a lot of 'em 'll roam around a while and come back home and end up tendin' bar right here, just like most of the rest. Your job is just to open up their eyes to the greatness of a Shakespeare or a Keats or a Dickens, or in America, Twain or Hemmingway or Steinbeck, and leave it at that.

"Readin' teachers teach kids how to read," he said after pausing for a sip of his cold beer. "We don't. We don't even teach 'em how to write, not at the high school level, at least. We teach 'em what it means to read and write with care. We teach 'em how to think deeply about somethin' important to 'em and invite 'em to begin doin' it themselves and talkin' about it. Then, they graduate and work road construction the rest of their lives." He laughed at his own little joke.

I smiled back and asked, "What about kids actually going to college?"

"We don't prepare kids for college," he said. "We show 'em what it takes to be successful in college. If they keep up and do the minimum work, they pass the class. But that doesn't mean they're learnin' what they need to know for college. If they wanna go to college, they assume the responsibility of preparin' 'emselves. Colleges 'at takes these kids with marginal scores on their entrance exams gets just what they asks for." (Although an English teacher, his language did become quite colloquial and grammatically fractured after a few beers.) "If colleges let 'em in the door, the colleges can worry about remediation. That's not our concern. Now you tell me, why, in God's name, do you think you need all these concordances for all these so-called 'great' books?"

Evidently, my answer at the time was not sufficient. But I was just twenty-four years old. Now I'm sixty. That's maybe not all too old yet, but my, how time seems to accelerate! I retired from full-time teaching five years ago. Those few years have disappeared extraordinarily fast.

My mission of creating concordances for every piece of great literature continues with my current close study of Julius Caesar. Act One contains some vital keys to that story. It frames two extremely important upcoming developments: 1) a surprisingly probing analysis of people, not individual people, but the whole of them, the masses, and 2) a study of the art of manipulating them. One interesting sidelight will be the devolving of Brutus and Antony to sameness.

Every character in Shakespeare possesses qualities and/or flaws he is unaware of. Other characters are usually blind to them also, but the reader always sees. It's fascinating. It's almost as though the character has a sixth finger on his hand, or a third breast on her chest, or a spare eye in the back of her head, or additional senses. But the character is completely oblivious to the fact.

Yes, I know. Sounds like I've taken a lunch along to watch for these things, but let me expound:

Macbeth is so much more than the ambitious murderer he supposes himself to be, and Lady Macbeth more than a power-hungry instigator and devotee to evil. Brutus has dimensions of character that belie his honor, and Antony prizes his devotion to a man beyond its reasonable cost. The two members of each pair at times seem hostile toward one another, but interestingly, they ultimately collaborate in a gigantic swindle of the masses.

Shakespeare draws similar conclusions about violence in both plays. Violence, he emphasizes, is undertaken either from petty selfishness or from a perceived danger to security, whether imagined or real. He examines with great care the forces that destroy nations from within, using as examples, Scotland and Rome, in Macbeth and Julius Caesar, respectively. He proposes that destruction comes from a confluence of many parties, be they political, military, or ideological. Those forces, although they may strive against one another for power, at times unwittingly acquiesce to perpetrate a fraud on the populace. The various factions agree to presume a lack of intelligence among the rabble and construct from that premise a rationalization to prey on their ignorance and fear. They don't press the ignorance of the majority; they merely ignite those who are easily frightened and then allow a conflagration to spread.

The strategy is as old as civilization and as current as today's Political Action Committees assembled to "educate" and "inform" voters. Intelligent public discussions of policy are nowhere to be found. Instead, people are told to be afraid. They are told of enemies who are perpetrating conspiracies.

The stoic Brutus becomes almost enraged when Cassius "informs" him that he must fear more strongly than he does. But it is fear that ultimately motivates Brutus to take a lead role in the assassination. Afterward, he defends the conspiracy by convincing the masses that he and the others have removed an evil from their midst. In doing so, he "informs" them that they have been ignorant of its existence.

When Antony gets his turn to speak, he merely explains what he construes to be the facts: Brutus has grotesquely insulted their intelligence. The "ambitious" Caesar loved them and graciously provided them public parks in his will. Antony shames them (without telling them he is doing so) into thinking they have allowed one man to halt their rage. He rekindles it.

His speech is no work of brilliance. It is easy for Antony to incite a riot. It is always easy to spread fear if one cares less for the good of the country than for self. Antony sets fire to Rome because he will miss, not just a friend, but the privileges his friend once provided.

Now before I continue, I must say, on a personal level, it's really hard for me to believe in the worth and worthiness of leaders, let alone masses. There's a lot of ignorance out there.

But as a teacher, it is my duty to believe in human intelligence and to foster its growth.

Socrates, the great teacher, said that humans wish to do good but just need knowledge; perhaps Shakespeare felt the same way.

I'm not so sure Shakespeare actually felt that way, and I have my doubts too, about the other man's "knowledge-to-goodness" connection. But the great Bard does provoke in me the growth of a new awareness: While I often waver between the dark, conservative pessimism of Mark Antony and the idealistic, liberal, slightly disconnected mind of Brutus, I hear on all sides people telling one another, not that they must do something, but that they must fear something, and that they must allow others to rescue them from it, and in every one of those ominous, bombastic warnings, I sense cruel travesties.

A teacher's job is to help students develop their ability to think and do for themselves, and so, I believe, it is our duty to put fear aside, reject negativity, find joy somewhere, remain optimistic, and no matter what we think or feel personally about the idealism of Socrates, assume that there's something in all people worth saving.

Shakespeare's message is entirely political and quite relevant to our times. I tell kids there's nothing more brilliant and more complex than Shakespeare, and nothing more relevant. His plays are a never-ending discussion of human nature. And, as you see, I have always tried hard to advocate for Shakespeare by confronting things political, not ducking them.

Interestingly as well, Shakespeare is held fast by consistent underpinnings: His view of the vastness of the universal war between good and evil, if there is one - and he's not so certain there is one - makes human conflict shrink almost to microscopic proportions. Hecate, in Macbeth, specifically calls it a petty thing. Humans don't serve good or evil, asserts Hecate. They serve themselves.

The same is true in Julius Caesar. The only man in it who truly strives to serve good is Brutus. He fails. He resolves that he will fall on his sword rather than live under a tyrant. Shakespeare allows us to judge whether or not his death is meaningless.

Macbeth tries, but fails to serve himself. He refuses to "play the Roman fool" and fall on his sword. He believes he has no choice but to play another sort of fool, who " ... struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more."

Socrates took his life to defend grand principles. We don't understand it fully, but we wonder whether his self-sacrifice, though famous, amounts to the same sort of protest as that of a Mongolian Monk who makes a public show of suicide by setting himself ablaze and running through the streets.

Observing these sorts of behavior, Shakespeare remains skeptical whether humans can do much about the larger "conspiracy" of good and evil (if that is what it is) that is taking place (if it is actually taking place). Considering the passing nature of life, human conflict seems to him a trivial matter. All experience is important. Life's comedies are just as instructive as its tragedies. We can choose to be afraid if we wish, but in the end, every last one of us will leave this stage. So, since "...'tis all one," perhaps we should fear as seldom as possible and appreciate every moment.

In the meantime, if we want to, we can make noble efforts to understand and spread understanding, but as we're enjoying this existence for the wondrous miracle it is, Shakespeare emphasizes, it's best not to respect conspiracies or participate in calls to violence.

Read him closely. You don't find themes and morals in Shakespeare that stray far from that.

During my youth and beyond, even into my early college years, I was indoctrinated by a Fundamentalist Christian church. The only truth, I was told, was "Holy." Then I started to read Shakespeare. For some reason, it was good to read wisdom from a source that admitted he was not "Holy," but only "Wholly Human." To me, as much truth has come from Shakespeare as from the entire Holy Bible, which has been closely read and reinterpreted in numerous ways. Every dimension of it is still being examined and rethought.

I think Shakespeare is worth a close read too, not just for the content of his work, but for the purpose of learning how to discern truth a bit more effectively, how to examine it and separate it from falsehood.

A close read of any fine literature, I think, is therefore a good idea. So, VT, I'm sorry for responding so late to your question. I hope you're still on stage somewhere, but wherever you are, here at last is my answer:

If God is a God of peace who means to save humanity, then, in God's name, let's all learn the art of close reading.