Let’s Concentrate on Shakespeare

Roger Knight

Editors of good dictionaries usually have the measure of their task. The editor of the great Cambridge Italian/English dictionary speaks of doing justice to these “two great languages” and the “cultural heritage they have in common”. With Dante in mind on one side and Shakespeare on the other who would disagree?

Unfortunately, that is no longer a rhetorical question. There are those who feel queasy when they hear that sort of talk. Doesn’t “greatness” imply superiority? Doesn’t it, as applied to our own language and culture, suggest insularity and elitism?

Such views are all too common in our schools nowadays. And they apparently infected the Kingman committee, which reported last April on what English teachers and their pupils should “know about language”. We must hope that they are not shared by the group under Professor Brian Cox, which is now drawing up the English component of the national curriculum. “All languages,” Kingman reports, “are rule-governed systems of communication, and none is linguistically superior”. If this means that children should not judge people by their accents or dialects, it is a reasonable statement. Kingman’s emphasis, however, falls not on the toleration of difference between or within languages but on the equality of all.

By 16, the committee says, children should know that “the status accorded to different languages used in any community is determined by social rather than linguistic factors”. It describes this as “a fact”. It is nothing of the sort; it is cheap sociology. We don’t “accord status” to the language used and enriched by Chaucer, Shakespeare and Yeats on social or linguistic grounds. We value it because it is part of a great culture. That is the only thing that makes it interesting and the reason why we have a subject called “English” at all.

“It should be the duty of all teachers,” Kingman continues, “to instil in their pupils a civilised respect for other languages and an understanding of the relations between other languages and English.” But respect cannot be instilled, it has to be earned. That’s a fact.

Kingman demands that all children “should make systematic comparisons with other languages learned or used in school and in present day British society so that an interest in linguistic diversity might be encouraged”. Certainly, if you know the languages of Shakespeare and Racine to the point where you can feel their respective powers and differences, you are likely to be within reach of a civilised respect for both.

However, few children will get that far in school. “Systematic comparisons” are more likely to lead to boredom; they cannot possibly lead to respect. What could it mean for the majority of children to be comparing the systems of, for instance, English, French, Urdu, Russian and whatever other languages their teachers choose? “The culture,” says Kingman, in one of the report’s better moments, “has to be revitalised by each generation.” That is true. And studies in comparative linguistics are not going to help. That kind of knowledge is an irrelevance and a distraction. An English teacher’s job is to help children get their bearings within the culture of the native language and its literature. In an age when the adolescent mind receives its most consistent impressions of English from a tabloid press of stupefying vulgarity, a “civilised respect” for what the native language and literature have been and can still be must be the first aim.

For of one thing we can be absolutely sure: if we do not respect our own language, we will not respect anyone else’s. Teachers of English have little enough time as it is to work towards that aim. If Kingman’s prescription is enshrined in the national curriculum, they will have much less.


Roger Knight is senior lecturer in education at Leicester University and editor of The Use of English.

The Independent 25 August 1988.