I love HAMLET. Every spring I have the great privilege to teach HAMLET to high school seniors. And I’ve spent over a year now deeply immersed in the process of writing a memoir about Teaching Hamlet as My Father Died. But now, this weekend, I’m seriously considering not teaching HAMLET come March.
I was already feeling called to make some adjustments to my lectures about death of parents and the nature of mourning because four of our 54 seniors have lost a parent. Our school is at the heart of a small, tight-knit, generations-old community, and the fall of a single sparrow is felt deeply by many.
Last week, on the first day back to school in the new year, we all learned together, in the auditorium where we meet daily for chapel, that another sparrow had fallen. Except she wasn’t a sparrow in the sense that sparrow signifies a common man, barely known, recognized or distinguished from another. She was an eagle in our town, in the school, in the extended community. The inspirational mentor, teacher and coach of over a generation of students, as well as adults. The mother of a senior and a sophomore at our school.
One of the major themes of my memoir is the enduring value of classic narratives to enrich and explain our lives: to connect us through the ages. In the lines and speeches of HAMLET we find that issues we may have just now started to sift through have been pondered by humans for centuries. We can both lose ourselves and find ourselves in these stories that were born long before we and our parents, and that will far outlive any progeny we may be blessed to know.
HAMLET gives me the opportunity to both learn and teach: To dig around timeless topics and philosophies, and to accept, embrace, and make some meaning of the reality that We all gonna die, people!
However, as much as I love the play, and as much as it has given me personally and professionally, this year I may decide not to teach HAMLET. Perhaps conscience is making a coward of me. Or maybe we don’t need to “go there” this spring. Maybe this poor class who has already been through so much doesn’t need to spend 22 days immersed in death, depression, suicide and graveyards in the name of not missing the English language’s greatest play.
Maybe we can just do a comedy.
Exploration of the depths of the human spirit is one of the many gifts of literature and theater.
But so are distraction and escape.
Maybe this spring I’ll be Teaching TWELFTH NIGHT.
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