Happy Birthday, Shakespeare!

When Romeo looks down on Juliet’s body, the mourning man notes that “Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, / Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.”

One could make the same observation about the play’s author, William Shakespeare, who died 400 years ago this month, on April 23. After four centuries, his words still ring with beauty and truth. Like Juliet in the scene above, Shakespeare is not really dead. Because his plays continue to be performed every day in theaters and classrooms around the world, he has achieved true literary immortality.

We live in an age of transitory entertainment. This month’s tentpole-event film is next month’s bargain-bin DVD at Walmart. (“Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice,” I’m looking at you.) Walk into any bookstore and scan the selection of bargain books to see recent bestsellers marked down to prices that more accurately reflect the impression they’ve made. It’s enough to silence many a budding writer.

Yet Shakespeare, like The Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” abides.

His work has become part of the fabric of our culture. Even somebody who has never heard of Shakespeare or read any of his plays is likely to recognize the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet” or know that a man holding a skull is referencing Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. They can probably even identify the character’s signature line, “To be or not to be.”

Performances of “Hamlet” can be somewhat problematic because so many of its lines have become part of our lexicon that audience members find themselves nodding in recognition at one after another, the theatrical equivalent of a greatest hits album. “Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark” is applied to many a political quagmire. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” is sound advice, even for those who have never set foot in a theatre.

Add these to “the lady doth protest too much,” “hoist with his own petard,” the oft-misquoted “though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” and a score of others, including “Good night, sweet prince,” so often applied last week to the late capital-P Prince, musician extraordinaire.

If Shakespeare were alive today, he would likely be horrified at what we have done to his work. He is often despised by teens, who strain under the yoke of his language in English classes, scratching their heads over his thees and thous and what they consider to be the tortured syntax of his sentences.

Shakespeare — and, by extension, the theater — was the popular entertainment of his time. Plays were not burdens to be endured; they were events to be celebrated. The best way to reconnect with that sentiment is to see a Shakespeare play, preferably live. But if that isn’t feasible, then a filmed version will suffice.

Watching a Shakespearean play proves the old adage that you can’t bathe in the same river twice. The lines may be the same, but they will be delivered in a different way by different actors on different nights. Even if you are watching one on film, where lines and performances are fixed, (ital.) you (end ital.) will be a different person each time — older, wiser, and of different disposition than when you watched it last.

Adam Gopnik, writing about Paul McCartney in the April 25 issue of “The New Yorker, notes that “each of us has only so many heartbeats. All artists have fat years and leaner ones afterward. They just hope that the lean years don’t turn into a famine, and that there’s enough seed corn left over for sweet if stressed fruit.” Yet Shakespeare seems not to have had such lean years. The man who wrote “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Romeo and Juliet” early in his career saved works like “King Lear” and “The Tempest” for much later, although the exact chronology can be difficult to mark. He went out on top, the exception that proves the rule.

Recent high-tech radar scans of Shakespeare’s grave at Holy Trinity Church in his native Stratford indicate that the Bard may be as headless as poor Macbeth at the end of that tragedy. The playwright’s skull appears to be missing, perhaps spirited away by graverobbers in the late eighteenth century.

No matter. Wherever his head may be, his heart still dwells in his sonnets and plays, beating away on the page and especially on the stage.

Shakespeare lives, on his 400th anniversary and quite likely on his 800th, wherever an audience looks for a good story, well told. And that’s an event worth celebrating.

Originally published April 28, 2016, in The Alliance Review. 


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

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Egging on the competition over Easter candies

I tell my students that the higher they climb in academia, the less appropriate binary arguments become.

After all, the world is more complex than right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, yes vs. no. The truth, to the extent it can be determined at all, is more than one of two sides. It’s often somewhere in between.

So I hope they’ll understand my sole exception, the area where it comes down to choosing the truth or the lie. And it happens at Easter.

I’m talking about the Cadbury Creme Egg or the Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg.

You like one or the other. There is no middle ground.

Picture a lone microphone descending from the roof of an arena toward the lighted ring below. The boxing announcer intones:

“In this corner, weighing in at 1.2 ounces, is the Cadbury Creme Egg. It’s 150 calories of milk, eggs and soy, wrapped in colorful tinfoil, that has never seen the actual inside of a hen.

“And, in this corner, also weighing 1.2 ounces, is the Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg, 170 calories and a blend of peanuts, chocolate and milk, also a stranger to any oviparous creature.

“Come out and touch gloves, boys, and let’s have a clean fight.”

At the risk of belaboring the boxing imagery a little longer, let me say that, for this chocophile, Reese’s is the winner by TKO every day and twice on (Easter) Sunday.

And I’m all about the egg. Forget Reese’s hearts for Valentine’s Day, pumpkin shapes for Halloween and Christmas trees in December.

Those seasonal delights, while still yummy, are walking on chocolate-covered eggshells compared to the Easter iteration, with its perfect ratio of chocolate to peanut butter.

Heck, Reese’s eggs are even better than the regular Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which are too greasy for my taste.

I know, I know, Cadbury Creme Eggs have the better pedigree. They hail originally from England, which makes them more proper and stiff-upper-lipped.

A fact sheet straight outta Cadbury World, the chocolatier’s tourist trap, er, “family attraction” in Birmingham (home of, I kid you not, the 4D Chocolate Adventure), notes that John Cadbury was monkeying around with so-called “French eating chocolate” as early as 1842. The first Cadbury Easter Eggs arrived some 33 years later. The modern Cadbury Creme Egg, with the distinctive yellow center, however, is a spring chicken by comparison, arriving only in 1971.

Meanwhile, Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs get an F for marketing, with little officially sanctioned information available online. The best I could find is an unauthorized history on collectingcandy.com, which says the candy made the national scene in 1967 after being tested only in Pennsylvania the year before.

Originally, they cost only 10 cents each, at a time when a dozen real eggs cost just 49 cents. This year, my Reese’s obsession has cost me almost nine times as much.

Here’s a little secret, though: I’d pay almost any price for them. It’s like “The Devil and Daniel Webster” written in chocolate.

My wife and I have a friendly back-and-forth about Cadbury and Reese’s every year, in the same way some couples banter about Browns or Steelers, Democrat or Republican.

She’s a Cadbury aficionado, something I didn’t know before we married. That’s a question that belongs in every couple’s premarital counseling. Forget finances, desire for children and division of household duties, what you really need to soul-search is if you can pledge to honor and cherish somebody who prefers the putrid insides of a Cadbury Creme Egg over the sublime perfection of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg.

I’m not saying it’s a dealbreaker, but it’s definitely a point to ponder, right up there with finding out your future partner prefers box wines to bottles, or Chick-fil-A to Raising Cane’s.

Interestingly (which is what people always say right before telling you something not in the least bit interesting), both products are made by Hershey’s in the United States (with U.S. manufacturing of Cadbury eggs outsourced to Canada). So whichever side you choose, Hershey’s wins.

There’s an egg-cellent Easter argument about capitalism in there somewhere, kids, and that’s no yolk.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Why deprive students of helpful writing tools on tests?

Education has a habit of introducing students to useful tools and then taking those tools away at test time.

It’s happening again this year.

If you have a child in public school, chances are good they’ve caught a case of testing fever. High school students in Ohio, for example, are taking or preparing to take various state-mandated, end-of-course tests and College Board Advanced Placement exams, many of which involve writing.

While the content of each writing assessment may be different, one element is depressingly common: Students may not use tools considered basic to almost any working writer.

The tests prohibit students from taking advantage of spell-checking programs, online dictionaries or online thesauruses. They can’t even use physical dictionaries and thesauruses.

By the way, the old-school plural of “thesaurus” is “thesauri,” which I looked up online while typing this piece, something students would be barred from doing on a writing test.

In some cases, even typing, a common composing method since the late 1800s, is prohibited. This, in an educational system that has prioritized typewritten work for decades, and which was so high-tech just two years ago that teachers were delivering curriculum through Zoom links.

But when high-stakes testing rolls around, it’s back to the Stone Age.

Just as unfortunate as the prohibition of various lexicographical tools is the failure to give students time for more than rudimentary revision. Gone are peer reviews and thoughtful reassessment of problematic sentences. Nobody gets to phone a friend on the AP English Language essay, even though peer assessment is integral to that curriculum throughout the year.

There are purists — I know you’re out there, I can feel your fiery breath on the back of my neck — who argue that spell checkers and revision time lead to final products that do not reflect what students know, but are more a function of how skillfully they take advantage of various resources.

But when teachers and schools prioritize such resources as useful (which they are) and teach with them throughout the year (as they should), why aren’t students allowed to use them on high-stakes tests? What is the point of preaching that the essence of good writing is rewriting if students aren’t given time to do it on a test, if the first draft, which they’ve been taught is merely a starting point, becomes the finished product?

If we trace arguments in favor of traditional pencil-and-paper samples back far enough, we discover a seldom-articulated fear: On some unspecified future day, students will be faced with a writing task where they cannot use technology, leaving them naked with their many writing flaws exposed.

A similar argument was advanced for many years to keep students away from calculators. It’s an odd belief that their survival may someday be contingent upon figuring out 18 percent of 287 with only paper and pencil. But if I’m living in such a world, maybe one where civilization itself has been annihilated, I’m probably too busy killing giant, mutated crickets with a rusty shovel to be overly concerned about math.

Seriously, though, I understand writing is produced for many reasons and under many conditions — text messages, emails, research essays, novels and timed pieces among them.

Some writing samples are meant to gauge basic writing competence, while others are intended to determine more sophisticated skills. All timed essays are considered first drafts and are evaluated as such, but so what?

A goal of education is to produce more students who excel at writing as opposed to identifying those who barely clear the bar. Given this, evaluating writing portfolios instead of timed-writing samples is far more beneficial to students and schools. Let a group of evaluators look at each student’s efforts to write arguments, analyses, and narratives, along with examples of the writing process, from first through final drafts.

Yes, this would take longer, with an evaluation process far more subjective and open to bias. These are issues that need to be addressed.

Granted, slapping an arbitrary number on an essay is far easier and more efficient. Yet the production of good writing is seldom easy or efficient. Why should the evaluation process get a pass?

And if these arguments aren’t convincing, then let those who would be horrified to send out even a casual email without using a spellchecker be the first to share an unedited piece of writing with the world, something we ask students to do all the time on tests.

Crickets, again, and not the giant mutated kind.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

I'm a patient, easy-going 'golden retriever'

I otter beaver truthful instead of lion – I’m a golden retriever.

A few weeks ago, I took a five-minute personality test at work to determine the type of animal I am. Based on my responses to 10 sets of words, my result was a golden retriever. In other words, patient, easy-going, over-accommodating, and confrontation-avoidant.

The other animals in the mix were lions, otters and beavers, displaying traits often associated with these creatures. Lions, say the test results, are leaders, otters are “cheerleading types,” and beavers are detail-oriented, dam (sorry) them.

The other people in my department were mostly lions, with a couple beavers and one otter/lion hybrid. (That person must’ve filled out the survey near a nuclear reactor.)

The rationale for the test was to determine how to best interact and communicate among our different “species.” When I approach one of the lions in my department, I should recognize they want results and have a tendency to take charge. An otter, meanwhile, wants me to validate them, while a beaver appreciates when I maintain a high level of quality.

I take all such tests with a grain of salt. A pillar, actually.

Merve Emre, in a Washington Post piece from 2018, writes that personality tests “are based on powerful, enduring myths about what personality is and how we can measure it” and are often rooted in stereotypes. While some people see the tests as “harmless fun, like astrology,” Emre notes that such tests are sometimes used by companies as a basis for hiring and firing. After all, if you’re in a business that values beavers, who wants an otter gumming up the works?

Speaking of astrology, back in the ’90s, when I worked in the advertising department of the paper you might be holding in your hands (unless you’re looking at it online), one of my responsibilities was the daily horoscope.

At the time, horoscopes were delivered on paper from a syndicate and were pasted onto the comics page. Once, I dropped the papers and hopelessly jumbled the dates, so the horoscopes that week were published out of order. I often wondered if this led any readers to take a risk on a day they were supposed to be cautious or stay home when they were advised to take a trip. In any event, nobody ever complained.

Similarly, none of my current colleagues complained on the day of our great unveiling, when we learned our spirit-personality animals.

Maybe it’s because personality tests are largely self-fulfilling prophecies. We select the words, traits or images that will give us results that best align with how we want to be perceived. We may do this at least as often as we select answers that actually indicate what we believe about ourselves.

But if the end results are the same, that’s a distinction without a difference.

I can’t quibble with my results: The golden retriever traits match me perfectly, especially the breed’s weaknesses. I am indecisive, over-accommodating, and willing to go to almost any lengths to avoid conflict. When I know somebody is angry with me, even if it’s somebody I barely know – like a driver I’ve cut off in traffic – it threatens to overwhelm all other concerns.

Still, one of the biggest benefits of personality tests is their aspirational nature. If I want to be more beaver-like or otter-like, I can practice diplomacy and intuition, respectively. I can also start foraging for sticks and balancing balls on my nose.

And here I am again, going out of my way to avoid criticizing a personality test created by people I’ll never meet, whose opinions should mean nothing to me.

Exactly the behavior you’d expect from a conflict-avoiding retriever.

If you want to try the test, use this shortened link, bit.ly/3LuV4hO.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig