Creeping like snail unwillingly to school.
It’s a line from Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” speech about the seven ages of man.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
(As You Like It 2.7.146-154)
Well it’s been a month since school started–five weeks, actually–and at the end of next week the school year will be 1/6 over. But who’s counting? I actually love my job, and I adore my new students (some of the Seniors I had their Sophomore year as well), but I do sort of obsessively mark the time as it passes. Not because I’m dying for summer again, or Thanksgiving, or Christmas, but because keeping track of the weeks as they whip by is a reality check for me. Our time together is so limited.
My predecessor and mentor, Mrs. Esther, always told her students “Senior year is ephemeral!” Or in the immortal words of Ferris Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.”
The Senior girls have spent the last six weeks exploring the Medieval Era, specifically via Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and a wonderful comparison by the Honors students of the Canterbury Tales to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron.
As Hamlet would say, “Had I but time!” The classes that the Honors students designed reminded me how much I would like to teach a course that compares Chaucer’s and Boccaccio’s epic works. Both are collections of tales, both function within the framework of a captive group of disparate characters (think the movies Stagecoach or Breakfast Club, or almost any prisoner of war movie) telling each other stories to pass the time.
One of the main thematic threads woven through my Senior Girls English course is that of women’s roles in throughout the ages. How can Chaucer and Shakespeare be seen as pro-women (I currently find this term more straightforward than “feminist”), and how can they be seen as anti-women? Both authors had the craft of being able to present stories and characters up on a platform for their audiences and readers to draw their own conclusions about. Some people see the Wife of Bath as empowering to women; others argue that by drawing such a bold and unapologetic character, Chaucer’s work calls attention to all the faults women have been accused of from the beginning of time. As Harold Bloom has been quoted as saying: “We don’t read Shakespeare; Shakespeare reads us.” In other words, at least part of what is so great about these men’s works is that there’s something for everyone, and you can see what you want to see. So many sides of the argument are presented via the different characters that it is often impossible to pin down what the author himself actually believes.
While Chaucer gives women a prominent role in his tales, many of them are wild, wanton, and manipulative. Now, one could argue that Chaucer’s tales merely represent the kind of tales the different pilgrims on the journey would be likely to tell at that time. Fair enough, but Chaucer–who clearly modeled his proposed 120 tales to surpass Boccaccio’s 100, which had been published in 1353, 34 years before Chaucer began his collection–only included two women tale tellers: a nun and a woman who had been the death of five husbands and was looking for the six.
Boccaccio, on the other hand, made seven of his ten sequestered tale tellers women, and was known to have said the he knew he was probably committing professional suicide by writing all these tales in which women come out on top, but he did it anyway. Interestingly, there is a small, old copy of The Decameron on the bedside table of the guest room of the Shelter Island home of dear friend of mine. Each time I am there I think, “Had I but time!” I’d read more of these tales. Maybe that’s why I assign this project. So at least once a year I get to learn a little bit more about them.
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