We begin, following Barthes' pamphleteer in Writing Degree Zero and for much the same reason, with a profanity: 'Shakespeare' in education is not best understood as the Author of a body of Great Texts but as the locus of a complex pattern of cultural negotiations (Barthes, 1953/67). That profanity should be a consideration is a measure of the cultural authority that has been invested at this locus and this, in turn, provides our justification for choosing Shakespeare as our object of study. Once it is admitted that our interest here is 'profane' rather than 'pure' and we have been, consequently and inevitably, dismissed from the sacred domain of The Literary, we can allow ourselves to apply some of the categories of cultural sociology to a set of institutional processes rather than to the creative genius, or mind, or even the body of the English National Poet.
It is thus that we question 'Shakespeare' as a given object. We do not assume that we are faced with a self-evident cultural, social and aesthetic category or that we are involved in a tautological exercise in Shakespearean exegesis, celebration or criticism in the usual mode, but instead that we are required to examine, in an analytically, sociologically and historically coherent way, a set of resistant cultural materials which will not in some spontaneous and intuited manner simply offer their true essence for sympathetic inspection. All of this should perhaps be obvious to any systematic student of cultural phenomena, as indeed it would be for most researchers working outside the heavily policed boundaries of English Studies. Unfortunately, however, the current disposition of political forces within English tends to ensure the impossibility of any significant recognition that 'Shakespeare' stands initially as merely a label for an amalgam of processes within institutions of education. The ideological production of such unintelligibility is, of course, another concern of the sociology of English in education.
All, or a good deal, would be in order had we omitted the term 'English' from the last sentence, since analyses of the kind we are propos-
40 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
ing have firm precedents in the field of educational studies—work on cultural transmission and reproduction, on the classification and framing of educational knowledge, on the history and sociology of the curriculum; the list could be expanded, but English and its teachers remain stoutly antagonistic to any extension of such concerns to their 'treasury' of the literary.1 Nonetheless, it is our intention to scrutinize the cultural capital of the 'Chancellor' himself, using some of the instruments already developed to analyse the social function of specific educational forms.
Shakespeare, like English and like education in general, does not operate in grand isolation from general social structures and processes (even if 'he' appears to) but is one of a number of quite central features of their very dynamic. Shakespeare as knowledge and as pedagogy must therefore be analysed within the relations of social power maintained and mobilised by the institutions of formal education. Fortunately, the kind of work we have mentioned within Cultural Studies can be brought to bear directly on English in education to take account of the institutional parameters within which the subject functions and by which its practices are shaped (CCCS, 1981; Widdowson, 1982). It seems to us that, as a result, it has been fairly conclusively established that the history of English cannot be divorced from a variety of socialising roles (most notably in relation to cultures of class, gender and ethnicity) and that this continuing process is in need of further investigation and, indeed, modification. For this reason we propose to investigate the cultural construction of Shakespeare both as a focus for English in the school curriculum and as a locus for the maintenance of more general educational principles. We have concentrated upon those organising principles which affect the disposition of features and processes within the educational curriculum in Britain (with particular reference to English and Welsh practices) by examining the discipline of English particularly as a force for mediating notions of 'general intelligence' and those practices that are conceived of as transmitting that which is specifically 'educational'.
In attempting to situate our object of study we have placed the term 'Shakespeare' not in the exalted company of a pantheon of other Great Writers but rather in relation to more properly cognate terms such as 'intelligence', 'sensibility' and 'education', thus making it possible to see beyond the label to the patterns of organisation in which all of these terms are engaged as principles. If English has been established as the fulcrum of, at least, the Humanities in British education, Shakespeare has become a major source of stability for this organising centre. Within the diverse ensemble of tendencies
41 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
and functions that is English (the literary historical map, the mission of national cultivation, philological and linguistic studies, critical practice and so on), it is Shakespeare Studies which provide a common point of deference as well as reference among an otherwise often antagonistic grouping of forces. Therefore we can usefully examine Shakespeare Studies as an underpinning legitimation and thus a point of entry into a whole regime of pedagogic transmission and negotiation. It is, indeed, a proper role for a sociology of culture and of educational forms and processes to attend to negotiations both within and between institutions embraced by this regime. In fact, we intend to show that an analysis of the ways in which Shakespeare is examined at the crucial linking point between the 'lower' and 'higher' stages of education reveals a good deal about what is involved in such negotiations. What we thereby identify are selected mechanisms active between the culminating stage of the 'lower' sector (especially preparation for and examination at A-level) and professional practices characteristic of 'higher' education. It is important to note here that the examining of Shakespeare performs a sensitive function which predominantly moves between and negotiates cultures of professional educators and administrators at both levels and leaves little decisive role either for students or parents.
To get at the specificities of these negotiations as they currently operate, we must take account of some general features of two relatively independent histories, both of which continue to carry an active force within English in education. Within the schooling sector this history can be seen to have moved from strategies based upon the transmission of that set of orientations, considered to encapsulate all that was best within High Culture, to a forced modification of this programme. The modification came as one result of the expansion of secondary education to embrace the vast majority of children which followed in the wake of the 1944 Education Act and forced teachers of English to develop ways of dealing with cultural forms radically at odds with those proffered by the Great Tradition of Literary Studies. To simplify and sum up what is a complex history, we can say that the exigencies of dealing with a new student constituency not familiarised with Literature (either through 'insensible familiarisation' or through hard work driven by competitive ambition) in the older pre-War manner generated a sequence of strategies which threw even more emphasis than ever before upon forging connections with the students' 'experience' (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977: 119; Bourdieu, 1977: 88-9; Doyle, n.d.). However, while 'literary culture' was becoming less and less of an active force within the home and leisure activities of even successful middle-class pupils, perception of ‘intelligence'
42 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
and 'brightness' in pupils by teachers continued to be linked to expectation and encouragement of success in English. The outcome has been to find a variety of means by which English, and therefore Shakespeare, could be made to 'connect' with contemporary culture, especially the cultures of the pupils. We shall illustrate how the strategy of forging a connection between these pupils' experience and literary culture so as to continue to generate that 'qualitative literacy' necessary for access to the 'higher' stages of English Studies manifests itself in the patterns of signification, subjectivity and knowledge characteristic of current practices for examining Shakespeare. In a complex and paradoxical fashion, this will be seen to be in operation in the identification of the figure of Shakespeare as 'popular' Elizabethan dramatist as well as literary author.
A somewhat different history of English in education must now be considered if the contributions from the 'higher' sector to negotiations which have left their cultural traces upon modes of examining Shakespeare are to be understood. At the same time, it will become evident that not all the tendencies which constitute this particular institutional history have been activated in such negotiations, particularly in the case of more recent mutations such as the influence of structuralist, semiotic, feminist and Marxist approaches, which have yet to touch practices at the points with which we are concerned here (or at any rate, as will be seen, not directly).
If the decade or so after 1944 saw the establishment of Scrutiny's mission of cultural renewal as a hegemonic force within English in higher education, the fifties and sixties saw something of an erosion of this hegemony, or at least its transformation according to more pragmatic orientations. The profession of English teaching and publication began to expand at an unprecedented rate, offering a wider access than ever before to a comfortable style of life and what was now a well-paid job as much as a 'profession'. In this atmosphere the moral tone of the Scrutineers took on the character of a convenient motto rather than a motivating force at the centre of the discipline's culture. It is only under the recent combined assault on higher education as a whole and the intellectual and political challenges to the ideological underpinnings of the discipline that English academics have, in casting around for some means of self-justification, clung once more to old and tired moral platitudes concerning the value of English for developing a fully-rounded and 'humane' subjectivity. The comfortable plurality of competing approaches that had characterised English by the early seventies has, since the onset of the current 'crisis', reformed along polarised lines of force which now clearly reveal the common features upon which this apparent diversity
43 Aust J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
rested. And it is these underlying features which are seen to be active in approaches to examining Shakespeare.
The contribution to the kind of Shakespeare studies with which we are here concerned can be analysed at three levels of cultural formation: patterns of signification, of subjectivity, and of knowledge. The terms 'realism' and 'transparency' help to capture the operations at the first of these levels. For all the pluralism of the late sixties and early seventies, only 'foreign' and marginal approaches derived from structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis called into question the hegemonic assumption of the transparency of language. Even Shakespeare's 'language' could, it seemed, be rendered transparent once unfamiliar and archaic usages and terms had been assimilated to a preferred vision of 'the English way' organised in terms of 'the Elizabethan world-picture'. 'Literary language' has notably continued to stand as the register of a nebulous 'value' or 'qualitative literacy', while literary critics continue in their collective enterprise of reducing to a state of transparency all patterns of signification, however resistant. Certainly some modernist texts as well as 'marginal' and 'popular' cultural forms have not proved amenable to such reductive-ness, but they could always be dismissed as operating below the threshold of truly 'literary language'. And certainly this is the case with work on Shakespeare at O- and A-levels. Here teaching remains governed by the 'facts' of Literary History, Period and Genre Studies and by modes of realistic and psychologistic critical reduction—approaches into which even the 'foreign' influences of New Criticism and the New Linguistics have made little inroads despite what are now old claims for their capacity to chart the special features of this 'literary language'. Thus the recent crisis has uncovered what in pre-War decades had been more overtly in evidence —that the 'values' or 'qualities' to which almost all work of critical reduction had been addressed were those of an 'English way of life' carrying identifiable orientations to class, gender and ethnicity. It is now clear that this underlying discursive unity, this 'English-ness', is the true life and soul of the discipline and that any sustained challenge and analysis faces 'English' itself with the danger of profane fragmentation and disorganisation.
It is of course 'Shakespeare' which signifies this unity in its purest form: a Shakespeare who stands as the supreme embodiment of the Englishman; the Author of a body of texts that are allegedly suffused with the preternaturally English modes of subjectivity and knowledge. This returns us to considering the other two terms of our cultural analysis: if the patterns of signification can be identified with a dependence upon realism and a reduction to transparency, 'English-
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ness' operates through recognisable modes of constructing subjectivity and knowledge which provide a gendered, class and ethnic uniformity. The boundaries of this subjectivity can be traced in a certain conception of 'love' which embodies a reliance upon the inculcation of a 'love of literature' revealed in the capacity for an unmediated 'response' to the literary text. But the more pragmatic orientations mentioned above have thrown even this domain into confusion by introducing persistent worries over what constitutes a cynically-manipulated or 'faked' response (see Williams, 1979). This same loving and passive response provides also a clue to the modes of knowledge that characterise English as revealed through our study of the ways in which Shakespeare is examined and studied. The ways of knowing which these practices encourage are of a pre- or even anti-theoretical kind and depend upon the imbibing of an amalgam of empiricist facts (the 'map' and the critical taxonomy) together with an intuitive-responsive perception of the text and the 'literary language'. To summarize, the truly 'educated' person which this mode of teaching and examining desires to produce and/or discover is one familiarised with this unified pattern of signification, subjectivity and knowledge, or at least able to simulate such familiarisation. The professional space and culture that is English in higher education is one that is almost completely bounded by this vision; it underlies the most common perception of the social function of the discipline, and it contributes to the cultural negotiations from that sector to the teaching and examining of Shakespeare. Part at least of what is in question in the processes of examining Shakespeare at O- and, especially, A-levels is the mobilisation of this cultural form as a means of selecting certain persons as 'educated' and, in the limited case, as potential members of the profession of English academics.
II
Shakespeare is an inevitable and necessary part of school activity because he is ... our greatest English writer.
(Newbolt Report, 1921: 312)
With the epithet 'Dear Son of Memory', Milton praised Shakespeare as
one constantly in our memories and brother of the Muses. Certainly
no other author has held such sway over the literary world, undimi-
nished through some three and half centuries of shifting artistic tastes.
Shakespeare's plots and his characters have continued to be a living
reality for us
(Coles Notes, Macbeth, 1982: l)
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It is hard, if not impossible to imagine the study of English Literature without Shakespeare for reasons not greatly different to those which suggested themselves to the writers of the Newbolt Report on The Teaching of English in England over sixty years ago. Since English in the curriculum, at least at the 'higher' levels, continues to be constructed around particular definitions of 'greatness' and of a specifically literary tradition—the values of which are to be understood and acquired through the unmediated 'appreciation' of individually authored texts—it still seems self-evident to many that attention should be focussed centrally and naturally upon those texts which are taken to reflect the incomparable qualities of 'our' greatest national genius. As both the Newbolt Report and Coles Notes make clear, Shakespeare's cultural power is such that it admits of no question: it exists in 'our' national memories, his plots and characters remaining 'a living reality for us'. This suggests an intuitive, common sense 'knowledge' which is shared equally by all, thus constructing a dubious national-cultural unity through the (im) possibility of an unmediated, unified response by 'us' to the transparent values to be discovered in the texts. In turn, these texts are, for the most part, to be seen as unified, organic wholes, simply requiring sensitive 'interpretation'. At no stage is this process to be seen as theoretically problematic — it is simply the 'obvious' practice of reading through which a 'love of literature' will be engendered.
Crucial to the argument, of course, is the construction of some strangely autonomous and homogeneous national 'literature'—or even the international 'literary world' of the Coles Notes version—in which Shakespeare has remained fundamentally unchanged and unchanging in the face of social and cultural development (Macherey, 1977). Clearly, such a view is historically inaccurate and, indeed, culpably naive.
As we have argued, then, there is an immediate need to clarify the general dispositions of cultural forces, pedagogic practices and discourses working through Shakespeare rather than to provide analyses of texts and 'effects'. As a case study, we wish to examine some of the versions of Shakespeare active in Education through the evidence of official discourses such as examination papers and syllabuses and in the highly competitive and lucrative publishing of Study Aids produced specifically for O- and A-level candidates.
Generally these Study Aids open with a brief biographical section and the significant discourse here is constructed around the suggestion that Shakespeare, as a historical personage, is a somewhat mythical, even mystical figure. Born (probably) on St George's Day, he was
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educated in Stratford, married, had three children by an older wife, joined a London-based actor's company, acted in and wrote plays, made money and therefore bought property and a coat-of-arms, was involved in minor litigation, retired to Stratford and died (conveniently) on St George's Day, leaving his second-best bed to his wife.
What can be made of this? In one way, very little but, consequently, a very great deal. Because our historical knowledge of Shakespeare's biography is so limited, it is all the more easy to construct a spiritual biography to which his plays are the witness. Hence Shakespeare becomes the supreme example of the poet of 'natural' individual genius, the absent, and yet authoritative author of a unified body of texts and, importantly, a Janus-faced judge of humanity:
What is it, then, that makes Shakespeare's art so great? Perhaps we see in it a whole spectrum of humanity, treated impersonally, but with kindness and understanding. We seldom meet in Shakespeare a weeping philosopher: he may criticize, but he criticizes both sides. After he has done so, he gives the impression of saying, Well, that's the way life is; people will always be like that—don't get upset about it. (Coles Notes, Macbeth, 1982: 14)
Crucial, then, to Shakespeare's cultural power is his status as the impartial, judicial critic of a transhistorical human nature and condition. His plays, we are consistently led to believe, perform a humanely consensual function —much like the idealized model of the British parliamentary system—in that they express and contain 'both sides' (our emphasis) leading perhaps to their critical reconstruction around those oppositions which constitute the eternal verities—life vs. death, good vs. evil, love vs. hate, appearance vs. reality, individual vs. society, etc. Examined in any material historical context, of course, such 'truths' appear insubstantial and lacking in specificity but their very force lies in the extent to which they can be ideologically constructed as transcending material realities and historical change, transporting us rather to static realms of fundamental spiritual conflicts which will ultimately determine how 'life' is for all time. Thus, Shakespeare's plays, for instance, can be seen as illustrative of the shallowness of political life and action:
Politics are the realm where, whatever the particular interests involved, the issues are to some extent simplified and generalized and therefore seen in abstract and schematic terms. Morality . . . has to do with the human, the specific and particular. (Knights, 1979: 85)
Through such reductive conceptualisations of politics and morality — in themselves, of course, constituting discourses — Shakespeare can be made to demonstrate the human and moral forces permeating and ultimately determining all political
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action throughout history. It is possible to sense here a connection with that version of Shakespeare as the representative of a 'real' intuitive knowledge in opposition to that which is crudely defined as theoretical, and therefore safely dismissed as self-evidently 'abstract and schematic' or, in all likelihood, dogmatic and didactic— political rather than imaginative, human, 'natural knowledge'.
The dominant tendency, then, is to marginalise the specificity of the historical, social or political conflicts and issues which surround the production and reproduction of Shakespeare's texts within patriarchal and capitalist systems in favour of a discourse centred on 'morality' and individual psychology. It is this sense of the unified individual/subject in tandem with an unproblematised notion of 'experience' which is the fulcrum of this discourse. There are even certain historical figures—not, of course, in any real sense, historical periods—who can be (im) partially understood through Shakespeare's impartiality and universal vision:
[Macbeth] would have brought home to Shakespeare's audience that the struggle between good and evil is an everlasting one. By using our historical imaginations, we can appreciate how the charged atmosphere of Shakespeare's time affected the audience's response to Macbeth. Such an appreciation can heighten its meaningful-ness for us. The perception of how Shakespeare universalised the contemporary may indeed suggest parallels with our own day, such as a comparison between Macbeth and a dictator like Stalin, who like Macbeth betrayed his own early principles, became paranoiac and suspicious of everyone as a threat to his power, indulged in blood purges, kept an army of spies and secret agents, and killed members of the families of those who had defected or been exiled. The knowledge of the Elizabethan Shakespeare makes him come alive in the twentieth century. (Coles Notes, Macbeth, 1982: 19)
Apart from anything else, there are, we suggest, rather more incisive critical methodologies available to introduce students to the analysis and understanding of the history of Stalinism than through a reading of Macbeth. The essential tactic is to displace Soviet history, viewing it from the superior vantage point of a 'great' example of English culture and seeking to reconstruct political history through crude psychologism. The important issue, here as elsewhere, centres on the English Shakespeare's universality. Far from Macbeth revealing anything significant concerning Stalin/Hitler/anti-semitism/racism etc., it is surely clear that contemporary discourses within such 'adjacent fields' can be seen to inform and, indeed, construct a 'knowledge' of Shakespeare, including his much-acclaimed universal perceptions and transportable 'quotability' on any given issue.2 In order to assert that Shakespeare 'comes alive in the twentieth century', it
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has to be assumed that categories such as good and evil are meaningful and constitute human realities external to specific socio-cultural and religious discourses and that such 'knowledges' as are constructed around them are non-ideological. Clearly, this is not so. To take, as an example, the terrain of sexual and gender relations, it soon becomes obvious that definitions of good and evil, on the one hand, have displayed startling historical variability and, on the other, have been integrated into patriarchal and capitalist ideology in order to justify and establish normative practices and relations.
It may seem like crushing a worm with a sledge hammer to dwell at such length on this example from Coles Notes and, indeed, such historical 'parallels' are not often stated so overtly. But neither are they incidental to the critical production of Shakespeare and, ultimately, such attitudes can be traced to the ideological construction of our National Poet as a morally and politically educative force working in the interests of human reconciliation. Hence the plays register the 'realities' of disorder, confusion and disruption but are finally structured around the re-establishment of social, psychological and national order. At the conclusion of Macbeth, for instance:
The joining together of the English and Scottish forces foreshadows the later organic union of the United Kingdom and is therefore proper. (Coles Notes, Macbeth, 1982: 53; our emphasis)
In this version, informed by an extremely crude and trivial historical sense, Shakespeare's 'prophetic soul' offers 'us' in the twentieth-century dramatic exempla from which we can learn if we will but understand and appreciate his plays in the proper manner.
The question which insistently presents itself, however, is: who forms the constituency so confidently referred to in the resounding 'we'? The cultural status of Shakespeare in our educational system is such as to make this question seem both profane and illegitimate. It is frequently asserted by professional academics and critics that the texts are self-evidently great works and therefore have wide appeal to 'the general public'(!) because —and this relationship is never interrogated—they are 'standard school reading' (Coles Notes, Macbeth, 1982: 22). Even more excitedly, we are told that 'Millions ... appreciate Shakespeare's writings' and 'enjoy the experience of reading the texts when they are at home or alone'. (Brown, 1981: 3). No doubt it would be regarded as cynical to request proof for such enthusiastic assertions but we may be forgiven for suggesting that any available empirical evidence indicates that 'the general public' do not read Shakespeare, nor are theatrical or even television versions of the plays so widely popular as academics would like to think. Indeed, it
49 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
is surely clear that the publishing market for annotated editions of Shakespeare's texts lies predominantly within educational institutions and that theatrical or television versions of the plays appeal largely to a professional class—with the addition of the tourist industry's sale of English theatrical culture in Stratford and London—to a constituency who have been educated into valuing, or aspiring to value such cultural events. Put simply, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Barbican and the National Theatre are not regularly filled by some heterogeneous 'general public'. It is also clear that the cultural representations which take place within these theatrical institutions are minority forms which are taken to be expressive of all that is best in the National Culture. (And Shakespeare is the keystone of this culture—even the foundation stone of the National Theatre dedicates the building to his 'living memory'!) The social relations involved in this arena are extremely complex but it can be suggested that a dominant factor is the connection between cultural aspiration and a notion of the 'educated person'. Possession of certain kinds of cultural 'knowledge' and attendance at its celebrations thus contributes to the constitution of a particular educated subjectivity associated with Englishness, with a 'love' of literature/theatre/'the' language, and with a stress on unmediated, imaginative, sensitive, intuited responses and knowledges.
We need, then, to examine the educational ideologies which operate in the construction of the cultural meanings which surround Shakespeare's plays. We have already seen how they are translated into a discourse of transhistorical human experience —students are informed that:
The study of literature is important because it is also a study of life ... you should gain a richer experience of the world in which you live. (Celtic Revision Aids, Macbeth: Model Answers O-Level, n.d.: 77)
Such bland and cryptic assertions are common in both Study Aids and Official syllabuses and they reveal a particular conception of human 'experience' which is both central to, and a consequence of, the 'enjoyment and appreciation of English Literature . . . based on an informed personal response' (Southern Universities Joint Board for School Examinations, Regulations and Syllabuses, 1984: 31). Very clearly stated here is the relation, already referred to, between concepts of Englishness, the literary, 'love' of the literary and unmediated response. Thus Englishness as both subjectivity and knowledge becomes a hidden means of judging 'life' or 'the world in which you live'. A further crucial factor is the assumption that knowledge or experience of both literature and the world is based on a blending of empirical observations and subjective judgements which result in the
50 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
testing/selecting of students on their individual performance of the following 'skills' or 'qualities':
The examination sets out to test the candidates' ability to read with intelligence and sensitivity, to marshall evidence and to express their response with honesty [occasionally 'sincerity' is the preferred term!] and precision... . Examiners are instructed to reward candidates who write answers which:
(i) show intelligence and sensibility
(ii) answer the question (iii) have some substance
(iv) are adequate in expression
and to penalise regurgitation of unassimilated ideas, irrelevance, thinness, and poor spelling and syntax where these impair the quality and comprehensibility of the answer under consideration. (Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board, Regulations for Certificate Examinations for the year 1984:28)
Where the examination of Shakespeare is concerned, additional emphasis is placed on the capacity to comment on the 'style' of selected passages from the set texts and to translate 'the plain meaning of words and phrases' (our emphasis).
It is possible to see in operation here the discourse through which approved practices of reading Shakespeare are constructed. The essential negotiation involved is the dislocation of readers from their material and historical contexts so that socio-cultural determinants cease to operate as determinants. Rather, the emphasis is placed upon abstract values such as 'honesty', 'appreciation' and 'sensibility' without any clear indications as to how such 'skills' are, in practice, acquired or assessed. The lack of 'content' in all of these syllabuses and the focus on lists of 'great' texts ('knowledge') and the cultured qualities (subjectivity) to which students must aspire suggest that the real content is to define the function of literature as a selective process to produce 'the educated person' with a particular kind of 'general intelligence' and mature 'sensibility'.
In so far as the content of answers written under examination conditions is concerned, the valued terms are 'relevance' and 'substance' as against 'unassimilated ideas' and 'thinness'. But, once again, how are these terms defined? For instance, Examiners Reports have expressed concern that students selected to write about such matters as usury in connection with The Merchant of Venice— but to many readers this feature would seem 'relevant' to any understanding of that play. It is, however, consistently stressed that texts are to be analysed for their discrete aesthetic 'effects'—characterization, language, dramatic qualities—in isolation from cultural or social context: 'candidates should be familiar with literary history only in so far as this is
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necessary for a full understanding of the texts' (Welsh Joint Education Committee, English and English Literature, 1984: 2).
If these are the qualities and skills to be acquired and tested, what problems are students asked to consider? At O-level Bradleyan character assessment remains a major concern of exam papers:
(i) Julius Caesar compares himself with a lion and he is often called *mighty Caesar'. How powerful a man does he strike you as being? (Oxford and Cambridge, November 1982; our emphasis)
(ii) Which characters do you think that Shakespeare brings to life in the play, apart from Macbeth and Lady Macbeth? (Oxford and Cambridge, June 1981; our emphasis)
Character analysis is often integrated into a demand for moral judgements:
(iii) Bassanio is completely unworthy of Portia. How far do you agree with this view? (Oxford and Cambridge, June 1981)
Thus the discourse of moral psychology constructs an interesting relationship between text and the student-reader whose moral self is nurtured and identified through character 'appreciation'. General theories or abstract ideas are set up for analysis by students who are hardly in a position to take serious issue with the construction of the question:
(iv) What view of love does [As You Like It] seem to take? (Oxford and Cambridge, June 1983)
(v) How far does the play Julius Caesar illustrate the view that politics is a dirty game? (Oxford and Cambridge, November 1982)
The common feature of all of these questions is that the critical evaluation of these Elizabethan play texts necessarily draw on judgements about life, love, powerful men, morality, politics, etc. Thus Shakespeare becomes the locus through which the student's 'experience' of life and literature can be brought together. As this equation has become more difficult to hold—very few fifteen-year-old students passively accept the asserted relation between their experience of life and of Shakespeare—there has been a tendency to emphasize the theatrical qualities of the plays. Thus students are invited to construct hypothetical productions or describe abstract dramatic 'effects':
(vi) Imagine you are to be either a producer or stage manager of a school performance of Julius Caesar. Make a list of three or four important questions you would ask yourself, with some of the answers which occur to you. (Oxford and Cambridge, November 1982)
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There are signs here that the pedagogic practice of teaching the plays as 'drama' is being encouraged on the grounds that students may acquire the necessary knowledge and understanding of Shakespeare through more active involvement in the processes of transmission. We shall see later how this does not represent a radical new departure.
At A-level the preoccupation with character and abstract moral values remains important:
Discuss the themes of loyalty and honesty as they are treated in Antony and Cleopatra, with particular reference to Charmian, Octavia, Eno-barbus, Octavius. (Southern Universities Joint Board, A level, 1981)
So too does the judgement of the plays in relation to the student's more 'mature' experience of reality/life:
The plot of Much Ado about Nothing is as unreal as the characters are true to life.' Do you agree? You are advised to limit your discussion of the latter part of the question to any three characters. (University of London, A-level, Paper I,1981)
By any standards other than those of English literary discourse such questions would serve merely to raise doubts about the sanity of the examiners. At A-level, however, students are encouraged to engage in that quite essential philosophical debate which underlies the whole ideology of literary studies:
At the centre of King Lear lies the question, 'What is man?' Discuss. (Oxford and Cambridge, Paper I, 1983, our emphasis)
From the wide range of examination papers we have considered, these few representative examples serve to indicate central trends in the examination of Shakespeare3 and these concerns are clearly reflected in the various Study Aids produced specifically for a market of students who need to pass through the selection process. Interestingly, much space is devoted in these Aids to translating the actions of the plot or paraphrasing passages of dialogue—thus, paradoxically, suggesting an awareness that the plays and their patterns of signification are not necessarily quite so transparent to students as it is often asserted.
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III
To sum up, then, there, are four major practices of signification which are applied to Shakespeare.
1. Language
At all levels there is a context question designed to test the candidate's understanding of 'Shakespeare's language' allied to the translation of difficult words and phrases into modern English. Here there is an acknowledgement that certain words have changed their meaning but not that the language as a whole has historically developed. Indeed, the suggestion is that 'Shakespeare's language' is the English language in its most supreme and imaginative form and that students should therefore aspire to an understanding and appreciation of this excellence. In the process of developing this 'skill', the argument runs, they will themselves attain greater levels of fluency and articu-lateness. Hence, language is constituted as a transparent medium dislocated from ideological meanings but rooted, once more, in human experience. The notion of a literary work using language to express, in a direct and unmediated way, human experience was one of Leavis' most influential values and, indeed, the cultural history which underpinned the Scrutiny project was based on a conception of 'Elizabethan' England as a time when language, culture and society existed in organic relation to each other, with Shakespeare as the key representative figure of this sensibility. This 'history' continues to be promulgated in a variety of ways: Shakespeare wrote for a theatre which 'represented all the classes of London, from noblemen down to labourers, and their womenfolk' (our emphasis) and this in turn 'suggests that the different social groups in the audience had a remarkable similarity in their outlook and interests' (York Notes, Henry V, 1980: ll). This vague historiographical construction is used to produce the notion of 'Shakespeare's England' as a 'Golden Age' in which the dawn of the English Nation and Empire is expressed through the 'flowering' of the theatre. Not the least important feature of this birth of the nation is its language:
Both Shakespeare's plays and the translation of the Bible share an eloquence, range and that mixture of inevitability and surprise of language which many critics would agree is the mark of poetic genius. (York Notes, Macbeth, 1980: 7)
Thus, the Elizabethan theatre is said to derive its 'strength' and 'vitality' from the 'shared experience of the people'.
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2. Character
At O-Level, context questions often ask the candidate to analyse the language of a passage to interpret 'the state of mind' of a character, while at A-Level students are pressed to judge characters in relation to abstract moral and philosophical values and 'themes'. In either case the underlying assumption is that Shakespeare created characters expressive of fundamental human experiences and dilemmas. Thus the question 'What is Man?' remains a static, ahistorical preoccupation leading to similar answers in 1984 as it did in 1604. The ultimate objective is to see Shakespeare's characters as individuals giving expression to all human experience rather than as representative of particular social groups or ideologies.
3. Theme and Structure
These formal preoccupations become more evident at the 'higher' levels and tend to suggest an analysis of the text as a self-enclosed organic, unified whole which can be structured around a body of ideas and meanings relevant to all ages. A dominant tendency within Shakespearean criticism has been the translation not only of the plays but also of their historical context into an account of idealist philosophical concepts.
4. Theatre
In recent years there has been a critical reaction against approaches which focus centrally on language and themes (the play as 'dramatic poem' in L.C. Knights' formulation). Such concerns remain important but, it is argued, they should be subordinate to the idea of the text as coming to life only in performance; it is this concept which becomes central. Shakespeare's 'theatre was different from any we know today, but the essential act of performance was the same' (Brown, 1981: 8). And by 'opening' ourselves to 'the plays as mirrors that reflect, in animated and revealing detail, the world we live in and ourselves' 'a reader can possess a text in a lively and personal way' (Brown, 1981: 2). Although it is often suggested that this is a radical new approach, there is very little that seems to break significantly with the dominant traditions of Shakespearean criticism. Because Shakespeare was 'the star of poets ... his works outlive his own time and are more immediately accessible to us than those of his contemporaries', so that '[i]n imagination we can enter Shakespeare's plays despite the obscurities that time has brought; and we can possess them as extensions of our own individual lives' (Brown, 1981:
55 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
21, 26). In this version Shakespeare becomes the 'master dramatist', the creator of theatrical experiences which can be elucidated through analysis of dramatic effects, spectacle, rhythm, speech and psychological sub-text, etc., and such factors are to be found in the text and are unrelated to particular historical audiences or theatres. If we 'open' ourselves to these features of the text, it is argued, we will appropriate imaginative experiences which will reflect 'us' and our 'world'. Such an argument is, of course, extremely crude and naive on three counts: the relation posed between cultural artefacts and society; the relation between subjects and society; and the relation between subject-readers and cultural artefacts. And, once again, the argument is based on a notion of unified, human experience. If the reader uses 'imagination and experience', the texts will 'reveal living images of life' and this is a 'natural' process:
The process of discovery, natural to an actor, is available to a reader. It is as natural as breathing, and as inviting as an opportunity to find a world made new or to make contact with the inner experience of the man called Shakespeare. The limitations are our own. (Brown, 1981: 15; our emphases)
Thus, it is clear that the 'performance' approach continues to draw on the same patterns of signification, knowledge and subjectivity which have provided the foundations for earlier versions of an education in Shakespeare. And, once again, the relation set up is one of cultural aspiration.
IV
The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him; indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word 'Shakespeare' on his lips. (Orwell, 1957: 28)
In Winston Smith's dream, later 'enacted' in his relationship with Julia, Shakespeare is linked to a gesture of revolt against repression, 'doublethink' and the corruption of language through 'newspeak'. Thus it seems that, without irony, in Orwell's dystopian vision this figure from 'the ancient time' is associated with all of those values which he saw as most threatened by the political culture of the post-56
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war era: honesty, commonsense, imagination, the language, the natural. (Julia's 'mindless' sexuality is revealing here, conducted with all of the wiles and cunning of her gender, while Winston is represented as more deeply concerned with the wider, political issues!) And, finally, an important feature of Orwell's fiction is the desperate need to hold onto the past—and Shakespeare is twice invoked—in order to maintain a sense of 'community' in the present as part of the struggle against a political culture which imposes an alienating isolation on its citizens.
It is interesting to see how many of these values remain present in educational theories of the curriculum. It is clear, for instance, that a major objective for literary studies in school is to inculcate 'good' social values, a kind of 'civics' or community studies. Literature is a 'valuable instrument for enlarging one's acquaintance with ways of life and ideas' (White, 1973: 46); it is also 'contributory to the development of sympathy and understanding' which will indirectly benefit 'the community as a whole' as well as providing for the individual 'a potent source of satisfaction for him personally' (Barrow, 1976: 144; our emphases). The ideology on which all of this is based 'is simply that literature is about the human condition' and Shakespeare is 'predominantly concerned with human emotions and feelings'; in other words literature induces knowledge of people, their actions and behaviour and the crucial 'ability to communicate generally' (Barrow, 1976: 143-5). And, finally, of course, this function of 'opening eyes' and developing 'elaborated linguistic codes' through literature has particular social and political merit in a 'community' such as our own:
It might not be of great value in a community that did not experience or want to experience any great degree of autonomy. But in a community where people have complicated matters to discuss, complicated choices to make and complicated decisions to reach, it is of value. (Barrow, 1976: 144)
At this point we would like to make it quite clear that we would not wish to be dismissive or patronising about the committed work of many teachers who, in increasingly difficult circumstances, continue to struggle within the terrain of literature syllabuses to stimulate and interest students. Generally, however, this is based on a notion of 'not giving up' the domain of 'great' literature to reactionary and establishment forces and of using this space in the curriculum to induce a sense of good, left-liberal social values. It is, thus, inherently a defensive strategy, working within the existing frameworks to construct 'radical readings' of Shakespeare's texts. Our argument is that, while such a tactic may be particularly justified on interim pragmatic
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grounds, it remains an extremely limiting objective and one which fails to attack, profanely, the discipline-bound framework which is geared towards the production, selection and valorisation of particular kinds of knowledge and subjectivity appropriate to a patriarchal and class society.
We have tried to show how, if we are to comprehend the cultural function of Shakespeare in education, it is necessary to draw upon forms of analysis which move beyond the enclosed domain that is English in schools and colleges. It has been our contention that more is at issue within the disciplinary forms which contain, and even produce, this 'Shakespeare' than some innocent process of spiritual-aesthetic elevation through the study of the collected works of the Great Man. Instead what is actually at play in Shakespeare studies is an identifiably ethno-centric conception of class, culture and human nature, a conceptual and practical orientation which is evident in a particularly accentuated form at that crucial stage of educational negotiations standing between the 'lower' and 'higher' sectors. 'Shakespeare' as a term can thus be seen to refer to those procedures and assumptions which offer continuing reproductive sustenance to those 'human values' which are taken to offer a qualitative measure of the national character or senses of 'Englishness'.
In so far as English continues to operate within the general, or at least Arts, curriculum as the area in which general intelligence is assumed to be measured, this leads us to conclude that an analysis of the modes of teaching and examining Shakespeare reveals a close correlation between the cultural dynamics generated through studying the works of the National Poet and those thought proper to the aspirations of the generalist: being 'good at school' remains largely synonymous with being 'good at English' and Shakespeare still stands as the measure of what success in English is all about. We would argue that this conception of Shakespeare studies and its practical role in defining what it is that constitutes the truly 'educated' person is in urgent and continuing need of challenge by teachers of English and related subjects in the interest of developing a much more critical notion of intelligence or 'good sense'. And, indeed, there are a number of important antecedents which can be, and are, drawn upon in such critical endeavours.4 Our particular concerns, however, lead us to urge that cultural and sociological analysis can provide intellectual tools appropriate for such pedagogic reorientation, as much to offset the notion of an unmediated affective response to the text (the inculcation of a 'love of literature', at least as an aspiration) which pervades the teaching and examining of Shakespeare in schools, as to situate Shakespeare and the category of 'literature'
58 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
within a social history of forms of culture, power and knowledge within the teaching of English at the 'higher' levels.
Brian Doyle teaches at the Polytechnic of Wales; Derek Longhurst teaches at Sunderland Polytechnic.
Notes
1. We are thinking primarily of the work of Renee Balibar, Pierre Bour-
dieu and Basil Bernstein. For a more detailed account see Doyle (n.d.)
and Longhurst (n.d.); see also, Balibar (1978), Macherey and Balibar
(1978), and Bernstein (1977).
2. Hunter (1983) draws upon Foucault's notion of 'adjacent fields' in pre
cisely this way.
3. For this notion of the (male) individual's 'direct experience' of litera
ture, 'the language of emotional states of mind,' see Hirst (1974: 54-5).
4. For a general development of this issue, see Sharp (1980) and Stan-
worth ft 983).
59 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 3:1 (1985)
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