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Learing
Family First Senator
Fielding to Education Minister Bishop (as revealed to Humphrey McQueen)
Dear Minister,
The prospect of a
full-frontal by an avowedly gay actor is far from the most disturbing
aspect of the King Lear that
the Royal Shakespeare Company will present tomorrow evening in
Melbourne. The ticket price will protect our children from the play’s
immorality.
Family values take a
battering in Lear. Two of the
king’s daughters grasp their share of the estate before turning their
father out of doors in an example of elder abuse. The king himself
declaims attitudes in defiance of the sanctity of marriage:
Die: die for
adultery! No:
Let copulation thrive.
And so it does
throughout the collected works.
Your concern that
schools are setting matriculation exams on reality television instead of
Shakespeare must not blind we Big-C Christians to the dangers of
exposing children to unexpurgated editions.
The National Curriculum
should stipulate the versions provided by that Eighteenth-century
Divine, the Rev Dr Bowdler, who made the plays suitable “to be read
aloud by a gentleman to a company of ladies.” His excising the
porter’s scene from Macbeth, for instance, eliminated the teacher’s embarrassment at
explaining why drink “provokes the desire, but it takes away the
performance.”
Shakespeare embodies
the moral relativism of the Post-Modernists. One can never be sure whose
side he is on. When Shylock denounces the Christians for their slave
trading, he is giving back as good as he got for their abuse of his
usury. Despite some leaning towards monarchy, the plays contain more
than enough regicide and Bad Kings to satisfy the staunchest Republican.
Finding a work to
prescribe for the young will be thus no easy task. Twelfth
Night has too much cross-dressing and gender confusion to be
redeemed by its commitment to the Three Rs such as when the household
steward, Malvolio, provides students with a lesson in spelling by
phonics: “These be her very c’s, her u’s and her t’s.”
Shakespeare continued in accord with the PM’s preferred pedagogy that
repetition is the mother of retention when another character immediately
asks: “Her c’s, her u’s, and her t’s? Why that?”
Indeed, minister, why
that?
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