Robin Lithgow continues her exploration of the history of the arts in education with this post about Shakespeare’s education.
Robin was director of arts education for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
This post includes a video of Robin describing her passion for her subject.
And it begins:
I know, I know—the “whining school-boy…creeping like snail unwillingly to school” and all that—but I actually think Shakespeare had a lot of fun at Stratford’s Latin Grammar school. Not only that, he shared that fun with his classmates.
For one thing, I am absolutely convinced that the first draft of his The Taming of the Shrew was based on a riotously funny collaboration written and performed by Stratford schoolboys, but I’ll save that for a another post when I can show a reading of Erasmus’s hilarious colloquy “Uxor” (Marriage), starring Xanthippe, the Shrew. (My gut tells me that young Will played that part and relished it!)
But I also think that learning dozens and dozens of rhetorical figures and devices was fun too. Why? Well, when you think about it, they ARE fun in themselves—like intricate word puzzles—and wordplay was a major source of entertainment back then. Either by good pedagogy or by necessity, collaboration was a constant factor in the Elizabethan classroom, and figuring out those devices together must have been totally engaging.
Just to demonstrate: I’ve attached here the full video of a presentation I did recently in which the participants engaged in a collaborative activity creating examples of four figures. I’ve posted segments of the video featuring readings from two colloquies (and hope to have one soon of “Uxor”), but the rhetoric portion of the video is in the first half.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If Shakespeare were alive today”
If Shakespeare were alive today
He’d have to learn to tweet
He’d have to quite succinctly say
That “Juliet is sweet”
He’d have to pass on Hamlet’s speech:
” To be or not to be”
Cuz Twitter is the thing to reach
The conscience of the King
Oh. My. Lord. LOVE THIS!!!
Robin Lithgow is a national treasure! Were I President, she would receive the National Medal for the Arts and a huge grant to take her educational ideas to the national stage.
We desperately need exciting art and music and theater education!!!! This is how you a) teach substantive content b) that excites students and builds intrinsic motivation for life-long, independent learning. It’s so important that Robin has demonstrated that this element of his education helped to make Shakespeare Shakespeare.
There are two central problems with Education Deform: 1. the Deformers don’t understand that the real issue is poverty AND 2. the Deformers don’t understand how people work. Real motivation is intrinsic, and attempts to motivate via external rewards and punishments (e.g., test scores) are destined for failure, especially with poor kids who have other matters to care about.
Bless you, Robin, and bless you, Diane, for sharing her essential work!!!
xoxoxoxoxoxo!!!!!!!!!!!
How do you turn young Willie into Shakespeare? Well, Robin Lithgow can tell you. THAT’S IMPORTANT!!!!
NB: Young Willie started out with a stable, economically secure family. Then he learned substantive content involving memorization of models, enactment, and PLAY.
The Common Play
Shakespeare had the Common Play
The standard for his time
There’s really nothing more to say
But “testing was in rhyme”
Before somebody hands me my head, I must make it clear that I am not comparing Shakespeare to rap music. Rappers like Shakespeare often play with words in sometimes funny and original ways. It is one of the reasons young people are drawn to rap music. My understanding of the genre is limited to maybe Run DMC, and I am not a fan.
What I do know about rap is that this type of “urban poetry” shares a love of language, a play on words and some very sophisticated wordsmithing. Rap, sometimes written by those with low test scores, is often very complex, funny, obscene and very politically incorrect. Of course, some of it is just dreadful too. Fans of the rap genre are not only urban young people, but young people of all colors and zip codes. Here’s a link describing some of the ways rappers play with language. Warning; some of the content is highly offensive. https://www.revolt.tv/2018/9/6/20823504/a-rap-playbook-26-great-examples-of-lyrical-wordplay
I can’t believe you are comparing Shakespeare to Rapspeare
Rapspeare beats Shakespeare
With bitches and hos
Ain’t got a race here
It ain’t even close
I have read and watched a lot more of the bard than rap. Most rap I have heard is tedious, but I have heard some that was clever like the play, “Hamilton.” Both genres use word play to entertain. That is my only point of comparison.
That was tongue in cheek
Retired teacher, I would certainly not hand you your head. Your observation is spot on.
I understand what you are saying, and listening to Hamilton or Eminem, I can relate. But in general, the only thing in common in rap and Shakespeare for me is that I understand neither language.
Speaking of the LAUSD, it made Gary Rubinstein’s blog inaccessible to school computers sometime over the weekend. I can still access myriad charterist rags, but can no longer view Gary’s longstanding, reasoned blog via my school computer.
Someone in the District’s IT department apparently has a bug up his/her rear end.
Sounds like they need a debugger.
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en.
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
–Willie Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Act I, scene i
A young friend of mine is even now in college studying political science. I keep getting these wonderful text messages from her about the things she is learning, and they are overflowing with emotion. Rapturous texts about exquisite Japanese calligraphic manuscripts. Incredulous texts about the history of U.S. involvement in Guatemala. Furious texts about the war by the Church on the Cathars. And what these tell me is that she is of open heart and mind; that she is powerfully, emotionally engaged; and that because of these things, she is learning. Those texts make me very happy indeed.
I think you meant “tests” make you happy.
Sounds like she’s not being tested nearly enough. I would recommend at least two hours a day.
And she clearly did not get the memo from David Coleman that no one gives a ***t what she thinks or feels.
Ah, yes. I stand corrected! I shall let her know that. I’m sure that she’ll find this necessary correction quite motivating.
My daughter gets similarly excited about what she learns in college, but tests manage to ruin the experience.
I am sooooooooo excited about the coming publication of Robin Lithgow’s book, Good Behavior and Audacity: Humanist Education, Playacting, and a Generation of Genius
Ms. Lithgow says that she hates having people refer to her as erudite or as a scholar, but she is both. She’s freaking brilliant and funny and has done work of extraordinary importance because of what it reveals about what constitutes a good education. Her discovery of the seminal importance to Shakespeare of Erasmus’s Colloquies and of the relevance of rhetoric as taught in schools of Shakespeare’s day for Shakespeare’s distinctive style are both MAJOR contributions to scholarship, but more than that, they are MAJOR contributions to the theory and practice of pedagogy, maybe the most important such work that I have seen in my lifetime.I cannot praise her work highly enough. It’s just WONDERFUL! Profound lessons to be learned from Ms. Lithgow!!!!
Thank you, so much, Diane, for sharing her work. So happy to have discovered her!
https://www.robinlithgow.com/book-project/
I’ve long thought that only someone with a tin ear and little understanding of people could think that Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone else, and especially by some aristocrat. His style is far, far too distinctive. If you turn from Shakespeare to any of his contemporaries, the language goes relatively flat. It lacks his distinctive style–the piling on of figure after figure. And, of course, Shakespeare is intimately familiar with folks from all stations of lives, with their argot and habits, and this could only be true of someone who, like him, who moved in a variety of different social circles over the course of this lifetime. Lithgow’s work completes the picture for me because it provides such insight into how the freaking heck such genius came to be. Well, let me tell you about grammar school in Stratford, she says. . . . [cue many, many delights]
Just freaking wonderful. Bless you, Diane, and bless you, Robin. What a gift!
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/erasmus-the-colloquies-vol-1
Oh, and BTW, the most interesting scholars are always the amateurs, with emphasis on the root sense of that word–amo, amas, amat–those who fell in love with a subject and pursued it with a passion that no school could contain. Another example of that: Robert Graves and his breathtaking book The White Goddess. Or George Lyman Kittredge, who didn’t have a PhD but was arguably the greatest Shakespeare and Chaucer scholar of his day, as well as a great scholar of the ballads.
cx: stations of life
What Lithgow has to teach about how to teach is the opposite of Deform.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/01/06/stopping-by-school-on-a-disruptive-afternoon/
Oh, and about Robin Lithgow’s discomfort with being labeled “erudite”:
“A woman who is truly wise does not think herself to be so, but on the contrary, one who knows nothing thinks herself to be wise, and that is to be twice a fool.”
–Desiderius Erasmus, “The Colloquy of the Abbot and the Learned Woman”
True of men as well, of course.
Lithgow said of me on her website that I had “actually read Erasmus’s Colloquies.” I was fortunate to have come across selections these many years ago in some textbook, and I’ve dipped into them a few times since, but I had never read them all. Would that I had! I might have made the wonderful discovery that Shakespeare must have read these in school and have borrowed from them throughout his writing life!!! Having discovered this from Robin, it seems, now, so obvious!!! That’s the way it is with genius often, isn’t it? Oh, of course!!! How could I have not seen that!?!?!? Robin Lithgow has a good ear.
Genius, Ms. Lithgow. Genius. Thank you!!!