Commentary A recent article in School Library Journal (SLJ) titled “To Teach or Not to Teach: Is Shakespeare Still Relevant to Today’s Students?“ reports that many English teachers want Shakespeare removed from school curricula to “make room for modern, diverse, and inclusive voices.” After all, “Shakespeare’s works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir.” After reading the article, I can only conclude that students should not be subject to anything these teachers might have to say about the Bard. Calls for the end of Shakespeare are nothing new. A 2015 article in The Conversation alleged dismissively that “Dead white men” “clog up reading lists and dominate the syllabus,” singling out Shakespeare as a preeminent example. In 2016, students at the University of Pennsylvania removed a picture of Shakespeare and replaced it with a portrait of black lesbian poet Audre Lorde. In …
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