THE DEATH OF READING OR AN OPPORTUNITY?

 The death of reading or an opportunity?

Last week a University lecturer claimed she could no longer teach George Eliot’s Middlemarch as it was too long and troublesome for today’s undergraduates. This caused a bit of a stir with traditionalists, particularly the “disgusteds” of Tunbridge Wells who’ve been having nastily elevated blood pressure because of it.

But she’s right. I’m doubtful if there’ll be degrees in English Literature much longer. How many people can cope with reading Shakespeare? On stage brilliant directors edit and reshape it and the best of our actors squeeze every drop of emotion from the remaining words. If you ever see the uncut Hamlet, which I was unlucky to do, you’ll realise how awful unedited Shakespeare can be. Yet there’s good news for today’s youth.

Chelsea Rowe has adapted a series of Shakespeare‘s plays: Hamlet, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for kids called Shakespeare in Shorts. Each retains the style and feel of the original language and has a total running time of 20 minutes. 

“Retains the style and feel of the original language”?  Well, I doubt that but it’s the effect of the sound of those words on stage that really matters. And here’s the real point of this predicted demise of English Literature as it’s been conventionally taught.

Great stories transfer to stage or film and there can reach and enthral a much wider audience than a book will. Can we honestly say the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle was untrue to the book? Or the 2020 Emma  film starring Aanya Taylor-Joy? Would Jane Austen have liked them?

Great characters in great stories are treasures that great actors love to perform and burnish when they do. And I believe Jane Austen and Shakespeare, recast as Jane Campion or Spielberg, would love this world. 

“I’d have loved the films!”

The problem with literature at university is it becomes work, not joy. Imagine having to read 1,500 pages of Clarissa by Samuel Richardson and be told it was one of the greatest English novels. It isn’t. Question: would it make a good film? 

Deep at the heart of that university lecturer’s comment and those who’ve commented so angrily on it, is a misunderstanding but more perplexing, a prejudice against progress.

We’ve the technology and skills to make the great works of all the great authors even greater stories. And that’s what we often do. Why is Austen so magnificently great? Watch the films of her novels. Her real, timeless legacy is that her writing was inspirational. 

I’ve recently been asked to interview several graduates. They are all quite well read but more to the point they have joy of life and imagination some suggest has been extinguished. What they all said was we needed more inspiring teachers in schools. But these teachers like those creating Arts courses and examinations have become stuck in their ways. 

I wonder if we shouldn’t consider creating a new comprehensive arts course including a selection of the greatest literature in the world, the greatest films and plays, world history, fine art and music (classical and modern) and modern philosophy.

When I read English at Oxford, we had to learn Anglo Saxon (Old English) although there was scarcely any Anglo Saxon literature worth reading. Some said this gave studying literature some grit and difficulty. What nonsense. It wasted a lot of time that could have been better spent.  

We live in a rapidly changing and exciting world. Reading boring literature from slower times may be missing the point.