CULTURE SHOCK:Today's students will learn nothing from such fatuous exercises as devising a marketing plan for Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
WHY SHOULD students (or anyone else for that matter) read old books or plays? For two, apparently contradictory, reasons. The first is to experience a strangeness, to immerse oneself in the reality that other people’s languages, assumptions and lives are very different from our own.
And the second is to break through this sense of strangeness into a sense of familiarity. After the thrill of encountering profound difference, we arrive, as if for the first time, back at the sense of common humanity.
The power of great old texts is precisely this – that by forcing us to confront what we do not understand, they leave us in the presence of the irreducible core of human emotions and concerns, transcending time and place. This is not just an aesthetic sensation; it is a necessary grounding for our capacity to live in complex societies in which not all fellow citizens are “people like us”.
This is why it is important that Shakespeare's plays, for example, are studied with absolute respect for their strangeness and difficulty. It is also why many people were distressed and depressed by a line in a recent article on the opinion pages of The Irish Times. Replying to Tom Garvin's attack on the "grey philistines" allegedly taking over our universities, two extremely distinguished academics, professors Mary Daly and Brigid Laffan, made a stout defence of their own institution, UCD. It was going rather well up to a point of head-in-hands disbelief: "To break the culture of intellectual conformity – the belief that the professor holds the key to all knowledge – we are encouraging more active student engagement. So today's first-year English students may find themselves working in a group to devise a marketing plan for Shakespeare's Globe Theatre – an exercise that requires them to be knowledgeable about the London theatre in Shakespeare's time: the plays, actors, and wider culture."
Prof Danielle Clarke, of UCD’s English department, subsequently distanced herself from this example of progress and insisted that her courses also do traditional things like teaching students to read Shakespeare texts in their historical context. This is undoubtedly true. It is nevertheless striking that, in defending the institution, what the heads of its colleges of arts and humanities chose to emphasise as an example of exciting new thinking was that idea of students collaborating on a marketing plan for the Globe. That instinct surely says something about what is most valued in contemporary teaching practice.
It is important, in this context, to understand just how fatuous an exercise the "marketing plan" for the Globe would be. The whole premise is that the world of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre is like our world, that the selling of, say, the premiere of King Lear, would be somehow analogous to the opening of a new boutique in the Dundrum shopping centre or the launch of a new perfume.
We actually know how theatres such as the Globe advertised their shows in Shakespeare’s day. They hoisted a flag on the tower to let people know that a play would be going on. “Each Play-house”, as a contemporary recorded, “advanceth his flagg, whither quickly at the waving thereof, are summoned whole troopes of men, women and children.”
A world in which troops of men, women and children descend on a theatre because a flag has been raised is not our world, and it is not a world in which a concept such as “marketing” has any meaning. Marketing has two functions: to let people know that something is happening, and to persuade them to pay to be part of it.
Neither of these has any application in Shakespeare’s London. In the first place, a theatre such as the Globe barely knew what its “product” was from one day to the next – the plays changed from day to day and new ones were performed as soon as they were written, with no time for rehearsal, let alone advertising. And nobody needed to be seduced into the theatre. On the days when it was in business, the Globe would have been a hive of market stalls, street performers, brothels, gamblers, bear-baiters, and an unholy mess of humanity. “Going to the theatre” was not an isolated event but an aspect of a much more unruly kind of social life. Indeed, the main concern evident from contemporary records was not attracting people to theatres but controlling the anarchic throngs that milled around them – hence the banishment of the Globe itself outside the city walls.
The whole notion of “marketing” in this context is completely misconceived. It invites students to bring a 21st-century, consumerist, mass-media mindset to bear on a cultural context in which none of its basic assumptions actually apply. It is a shortcut to making the strange familiar. Instead of working through the effort of encountering radical difference and then connecting with what is the same, it simply redefines difference as sameness.
I don’t doubt that, at UCD and elsewhere, many teachers and students still devote themselves to the hard – and ultimately solitary – experience of reading complex texts. Nor do I doubt that there are many positive aspects to the changes in the way university departments and courses are now organised to allow for much more cross-fertilisation between disciplines. But in their anxiety to emphasise the new, and with their perceived need to justify themselves through a utilitarian language of management-speak, university managers can end up giving the impression of distorted values.
Inadvertently perhaps, they come across as being vaguely ashamed of the old-fashioned exercise of helping students to encounter hard stuff. The instinct to cite marketing the Globe rather than, say, examining the pattern of apocalyptic imagery in King Lear, as being emblematic of the excitement of contemporary scholarship is symptomatic of a deeper problem. If those who run universities feel embarrassed about praising and defending basic scholarship to the general public, that public might conclude that it is not all that important.