'Vibrate and Live and Charm the Senses'

A sign went up last week in front of an auto repair shop near our house: “A good teacher is worth a ton of books.” I assume the head mechanic’s wife teaches third grade. The sentiment’s veracity hinges on “good.” There was a time when we could assume a public-school teacher was reasonably smart, well-educated (even if largely self-educated) and dedicated to learning and passing on the tradition into which he or she was born. No longer. As the literacy and competence of teachers have sunk, the sentimentality surrounding their profession has soared. There are good teachers, of course, many of whom are not employed in education. They tend to appear only when the student is ready, and that is a rare occurrence. In The March of Literature (1938) Ford Madox Ford writes, “No teacher can teach Shakespeare,” and continues:

“You might perhaps point out hidden beauties in Villon, because of the difficulties of his language; or a very few annotations of Chaucer might help the reader, because of the complete differentness of the habits and frame of mind of his day. But Shakespeare is just ourselves at no excruciatingly esoteric mental level.”

There’s nothing foreign about Shakespeare (or Swift, or Johnson). We are members of the same species, Homo sapiens, and of the same country, English. To read Shakespeare and the others is merely to embrace our birthright.     

“The English or American adult male is said to remain all his life at about the intellectual high water mark of the fourteen-year-old schoolboy and there is nothing in the thought of Shakespeare’s plays that an intelligent fourth-form schoolboy could not enthusiastically applaud and corroborate. You have Menenius [“What work’s, my countrymen, in hand? where go you / With bats and clubs? The matter? speak, I pray you.”] as the solver of social problems and the Taming of the Shrew as the answer to the woman question.”

The first Shakespeare play I saw on the stage was Taming of the Shrew. I was fourteen, the same age as Ford’s hypothetical fourth-former. It reminded me of silent slapstick, Buster Keaton with sex.

“The most the ‘teacher’—and, alas, quis docebit ipsos doctores? [who will teach the teachers?]—can do for a pupil is to perform the function of an easier dictionary, telling the meaning of a tassel gentle, a hernshaw, a fardel, a bourne. But no one can explain why Shakespeare’s words, set one beside the other, vibrate and live and charm the senses.”