Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina
My son recently finished Hamlet for class and it has been so long since I read it that we could only talk superficially about it. Thank you for the great lecture!
Most enjoyable. Hope you can sprinkle in reflections on some other plays from the Bard.
I’ve been reading Mansfield Park lately. There is an interesting dialogue between Edmund Bertram and Henry Crawford, after Crawford’s moving reading from Shakespeare, revealing how essential the study of Shakespeare was in the education of a gentleman (at least) in England in the second decade of the nineteenth century. I wonder when Shakespeare’s work became so essential in the education of England’s youth. How soon after his death did his work become an indispensable part of the curriculum?
You are asking two related but separate questions. The narrow question is when did Shakespeare become part of the school curriculum for young English gentleman. Some time in the late 19th/early 20th century, certainly after Matthew Arnold. The study of literature in schools and universities of Jane Austen’s time was limited to Greek and Latin. Of course, young people, girls especially, read the English classics as well as contemporary literature and usually acquired at least French. In the 17th century many were also studying Italian. Shakespeare was being read with the earliest publication of his works, and the tribute of England’s most influential Elizabethan writer, Ben Jonson, shows how highly he was regarded in his own day. Taste changed in the Restoration, but plays were performed, people read him, and Dryden did an important rewrite of Antony and Cleopatra. Pope did an edition and Dr Johnson’s young friend David Garrick did a great deal to make Shakespeare the great national writer and Johnson himself contributed no small effort to Shakespeare.
I apparently misunderstood Crawford’s having said that he hadn’t read Shakespeare since he finished school at fifteen to have meant that they had actually studied Shakespeare in school. Thank you for the correction and expansion on the topic. It is amazing how much more was accomplished in educating young people by such an early age than we can manage through a doctorate degree now. Try telling people these days what can and should be done (indeed, was done) in the way of educating our youth and they reply that such people will inevitably be social misfits and emotionally stunted. The mind boggles.