Students warned that Shakespeare's Twelfth Night has cross-dressing scenes

[IwantToRetire]

University of Liverpool cautions that the play - which features cross-dressing characters and has been enjoyed by audiences for more than four centuries - contains depictions of gender which are 'significantly different to views held today'.

Historian Jeremy Black, author of England In The Age Of Shakespeare, added:

'As the University of Liverpool so aptly but unintentionally notes, the views of some 'on equality, diversity and inclusivity' are unhelpful to an appreciation of national culture.

'Unfortunately, the 'some' include the English Literature department of that university.

The university said:

'Students need to understand the historical context of the texts. This workshop is an opportunity to explore attitudes to, and beliefs about, sex and gender in the late 16th and early 17th centuries - which are in many ways significantly different to views and beliefs held today.

'This is helpful context for understanding a wide range of literary texts from that time. The workshop note on content lets students know that different views on gender and sexual difference will be explored.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15416797/Students-warned-Shakespeare-Twelfth-Night-cross-dressing-scenes.html

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The early days “original practices” productions at the Globe certainly revealed layers of meaning that maybe are lost on audiences with sex correct casting. Boys-as-girls-as-boys, male characters falling in love with them and not knowing why, the men-as-women nurses talking with their young boys-as-girls charges about love and relationships. The all-female productions (to address the balance) were pretty terrific too in a different way.

So many of Shakespeare comedies rely on disguise to drive the plot. You even get trans-donkey disguising going on in midsummer nights dream!

Women were not allowed on stage in England until the second half of the seventeenth century, but women acted on stage in e.g. Spain, and the Commedia dell' arte included women characters played by women.
This practice in England probably explains panto dames and also principal boys, as 'britches' parts were fashionable in the eighteenth century, so any excuse to disguise a woman as a boy/young man was taken.
Don't know why university students studying English Lit would not know this. But of course exploring the idea that people dressed as the opposite sex whilst knowing they were not that sex (which is also exemplified in the women who cross-dressed to enter male professions) does make the idea of trans look imaginary and may make students question gender ideology! (One can but hope.)

Ha ha ha, this is funny.

Either the kids shouldn't be at university, or the faculty. What fucking morons.

Next thing, there’ll be a trigger warning for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in case any furries get offended by the audience laughing at Bottom.

The university said: 'Students need to understand the historical context of the texts. This workshop is an opportunity to explore attitudes to, and beliefs about, sex and gender in the late 16th and early 17th centuries - which are in many ways significantly different to views and beliefs held today.

'This is helpful context for understanding a wide range of literary texts from that time. The workshop note on content lets students know that different views on gender and sexual difference will be explored.'

I have a dc in final year of Eng Lit at uni, and it strikes me how few whole books they are reading. Mostly they appear to study extracts, often substantial extracts, and look at them through different lenses, or in comparison to other texts. While they read a lot, they read very few whole books. How can you engage deeply with literature when it is constantly taken out of context? How can you engage with literature if you only ever read it with a predecided objective, never receptively with an open mind?

It's as shallow and performative as claiming that cross-dressing is equivalent to being the opposite set.

This starts off in secondary school where children often no longer read a whole text. There are no class readers anymore ( a shared reading of a novel), and as you say it is just sample extracts that are studied.

I recall one incident, that I'm pretty sure that would have been replicated at numerous schools, whereby rather than actually read Shakespeare's 'Romeo & Juliet' the class just watched 'Baz Luhrmann's' version.So you'd end up with pupils referring to "fights with guns" and about how R&J "spotted each other, for the first time, through a fish tank".

Everything tends to get referred back to personal feelings and to personal effect, rathar than to an analytical discussion of a text. Also, there is too much teacher scaffolding and heavily managed coursework to the extent that the pupils can no longer independently structure an essay or examine an argument themselves.

@Apareciumand @ShortshriftandlethalI am secondary school English teacher and very interested in this phenomenon (it wasn’t the case when I was at uni 20 years ago) and read a very interesting article about it in The Atlantic last year. It’s called ‘THE ELITE COLLEGE STUDENTS WHO CAN’T READ BOOKS’: To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school

Along the same lines, I recently read this article, which talks about how a particular approach to teaching reading (basically guessing using context, rather than teaching phoneme-grapheme relationships; predominantly used in the US, though I believe variations have been used in the UK too) has contributed to the breakdown of reading skills:

www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading

I was a massive reader when I was at school and loved nothing more than immersing myself in a good book. However, I hated English at school, all that analysing of what was going on. I just wanted to enjoy it. And I certainly didn’t enjoy Shakespeare - who would when it involved 30 bored students sat at their desks droning their way through a live reading only understanding one word in every three?

It’s disappointing to learn that increasing pupil engagement is at the cost of depth of knowledge.

If you’ve made it to university and can’t understand that attitudes can change in a relatively short period of time (cf attitudes to gay rights from the mid 20th century onwards) let alone 400 FUCKING YEARS, then you shouldn’t be out unaccompanied let alone never mind studying for a degree.

In that case, pantomimes should have trigger warnings. What with the principal boy being played by a woman and the pantomime dame being played by a man, people will be fainting in the aisles!

I thought it a bit chilling when a poster said upthread

My daughter is something of a Shakespeare afficionado having done her English Lit degree, and then MA, at Liverpool University, but only just as this absolute batshittery started to infiltrate the curriculum. She says that it then started to become about never directly engaging with the text at all, and only reading texts through the lens of DEI readings.

and then another poster responded

I have a dc in final year of Eng Lit at uni, and it strikes me how few whole books they are reading. Mostly they appear to study extracts, often substantial extracts, and look at them through different lenses, or in comparison to other texts. While they read a lot, they read very few whole books. How can you engage deeply with literature when it is constantly taken out of context? How can you engage with literature if you only ever read it with a predecided objective, never receptively with an open mind?

What the hell are we teaching our young people?

Bullshit, sometimes, the best bet is to counter it at home.

I hope that when my first grand hog goes to school it will have died right down.

Heh! I think just the same, and she is under a year old, but I'm not holding my breath.

Not all English teachers are like that (NAETALT). I think that my brother is a total wanker because of his TWAW views but he has taught Macbeth to top set GCSE for several years. He has a class set of Macbeth by Jo Nesbo that he hands out at Christmas each year. It took him several years to get Academy approval but, judging by the GCSE results, reading two texts set in historical and contemporary cultures, seems to work.

I believe the real point of it all is to allow the teachers, or those developing the curricula, to use the texts in the way that supports the ideas they wish to inculcate.

Ove the past few decades in the province I live in, they have cut the history entirely drom middle school - that is, history told in a more or less straightforward, chronological way. Instead they have themes for each year, like "culture" or "resistance" and they study bits of history centred around those themes.

And the kids don't even have the foggiest about real history, so they can't spot how the story is being spun.

The whole attitude is so arrogant IMO. As if some modern DEI-obsessed, trans-obsessed set of attitudes that have developed over the past 15 years are guaranteed to be the most correct and righteous, with all of history and literature from the past being judged, trigger-warninged and often condemned for not being inclusive or anti-colonialist enough.

Especially Shakespeare whose main USP is the universality and relatability of what he writes about, and how he was actually very open-minded and questioning for his time and gave us diversity and “marginalised” people and their points of view, women characters who are as smart as men, and explored ideas like mental illness, colonialism and identity that people are wringing their hands about today as if they’re the first generation to have thought about it.

The idea that we have nothing to learn from anyone or anything we can categorise as less woke than the wokest modern midwit university lecturer is so stupid. And just makes everything more stupid as it cuts off sources of wisdom and things that provoke thought and reasoning skills.

I feel that we have lionised youth too much in recent times; played into the idea that young people are oppressed and marginalised and that older generations have sucked up all of the 'benefits' and have nothing of value to contribute. This started off, or was magnified, with the appearance of Greta Thunberg, in my mind...or around about then.

Youth, by nature, always feels it is the first to experience anything; the first to have rebelled, or to have pushed against contraints and established ways of doing things. Older people are just fuddy duddies and beholden to tradition or convention. We must listen to the youth and side-line the elderly.

What is not appreciated is that everything 'new' is just recycled old stuff.

A couple of years ago I got my EngLit dc to watch Some Like It Hot with me. I said that it was a comedy about two male musicians who witness a gangland killing and dress up as women to join a women’s touring musical band to escape. I used that language deliberately.

Dc knows my position on the issues of transgenderism. Dc watched with me and loved it as much as I do. After the film they said, “I thought it was going to be transphobic, but it wasn’t at all.”

Rationality by drip, drip, drip.

I read English back in the day and still remember the C19th novel essay - never read so many long books over two weeks in my life. Literally holed up in my room for days, filling in the gaps of the ones I didn't already know.

Lightweights.

How can you properly understand the different genres if you never actually - you know - read them widely and in their specific formats.

I think this has been going on for decades really. Greta is an good example over the last few years, and it seems to have ramped up where supposedly intelligent people really believe the youth have some kind of special gnostic awareness - there was the whole "I'd rather be dead than 50" thing in the 1960s, for example.

But it is weird, many people seem to think that what the youth believe now must be the wave of the future. Whereas it seems to me that a lot of what young people seem to believe, in all times, is naive and impractical. At the moment, it also often seems to be ill-educated.

Omg yes. I also had to read every single Shakespeare play in full, Beowulf in old English, and Troilus and Criseyde {Chaucer’s). (Though not all in 2 weeks…)

I got The Mill on the Floss out of the library once, and the librarian commented that they liked long books in those days as there was no telly. 😉