WELCOME TO THE WINTER 2012 EDITION OF

TEACHING ENGLISH TODAY

 

We trust that you will find the articles that follow interesting, challenging and useful.

Please feel free to respond to / add to / challenge any of the views expressed in the articles.

And please do send us your contribution for the next issue (due November 2012).  Send these to the Editor at drv@worldonline.co.za – and maybe you could win a copy of The Longman South Africa School Dictionary. 

Longman Dictionaries

Longman dictionaries have played a significant role in the development, analysis and teaching of English since

1755. Longman has a comprehensive list of dictionaries available for Grades 4 to 12.

 Longman South African School Dictionary plus CD-ROM Suitable for Grades 4 – 9

The interactive CD-ROM allows learners to:

•      Look up the full contents of the dictionary
•      Listen to the pronunciation of all the words
•      Record themselves to check their pronunciation
•      Practise spelling, vocabulary and grammar in the Language Trainer
•      PLUS: Photo dictionary and video clips to enhance understanding

9781408202630 Longman South African School Dictionary with CD-ROM

 

 

 

 

                                                  Editorial

English teachers – be an inspiration to your

students!

                  Dr Malcolm Venter

When I was in Standard 4 (the equivalent of Grade 6) at Muir College in Uitenahge, we had a new English teacher arrive in May. He was actually high-school trained, and set us a stinker of an exam paper. I can still remember one of the questions: Choose the correct word from the pair in brackets in the following: One of the apples (is/are) bad. I wrote are. When I discussed the exam paper with my father afterwards, he said: ‘No, it’s is; one is, not one are.’ I decided there and then that I was going to master the English language rather than allowing it to master me – and I decided (having chosen to be a teacher in my first year of school) to major in English. Mr Frankie Esselaar went on to inspire me for the rest of the year – and then he moved to the high school, where he continued his good work in Standard 8 (Grade 10).

I was most fortunate then to have Mrs Iris Dugmore in Standard 5 – someone who conveyed such a love for the subject and teaching it. Funnily enough, after she had retired, she came also back for a year – my Std 7 year. (Interestingly enough, her husband had taught my father English at Muir – and my father always said that this man developed in him a love of English.)

These wonderful people, along with others – Mrs Rhona Ashmead and Mr Cecil Clement – are examples of what teachers ought to be. They did nothing special in terms of methods – no group work, audio-visual aids – they just showed me that they loved what they were doing.

I was then fortunate to go on to Rhodes, where I had a series of wonderful lecturers – including the iconic Professor Guy Butler and the innovative Professor William Branford (who introduced me to Linguistics).

The result was that I went on not only to teach English but to continue studying it to doctorate level.

Having retired from the profession, I can say that these teachers gave me the chance to have one of the most fulfilling careers that anyone could hope for.

 

How about telling us your story about teachers who inspired you? Send you contributions to drv@worldonline.co.za.

 

 

‘Teach the books, touch the heart’

(With apologies to the New York Times, April 20, 2012)

‘This is not a (talk) about books. It’s a (talk) about people.’

(The Reading Promise, by Alice Ozma)

Pamela Neethling

Media Centre Hilton College

The following is a presentation which Pamela gave at the Hilton College English Conference on 18 May this year.

C. S. Lewis said, ‘We read to know that we are not alone.’

Lewis was absolutely not thinking about literacy in South Africa when he uttered that much-quoted line, but I have still found it comforting. We are not alone in South Africa, as we face the terrifying truth that many of our young people cannot read, or will not read, never mind read adequately enough to ‘meet the demands of (future) work and social networks’ (The Global Literacy Challenge, 2008).

Literacy is a global concern because it is ‘a survival tool in a fiercely competitive world’ (The Global Literacy Challenge, 2008).  We are nearing the end of UNESCO’s Literacy Decade that began in 2003. With its slogan, Literacy as Freedom, UNESCO’s aim has been to provide a framework for literacy in a world where it is estimated that one in five adults cannot read or write, at all.  Literacy is a basic human right, which is why the goals of UNESCO have been coupled with strategies such as the Education for All campaign and the Millennium Development Goals.

According to the United Nations Development Programme report, 2011, our literacy rate in South Africa is 88 per cent and we are 113 out of a possible 183 countries, ranked number 58 in the world. But in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, 2006, which compared ten-year-olds from 35 different countries, South Africa was bottom of the pile, despite the fact that the South African students tested were older, at 11.9 years, than the average, a concession made due to ‘the challenge of multiple native languages and the language of instruction’ (Mullis et al, 2007).

Illiteracy – or even low literacy – is an expensive problem. The World Literacy Foundation estimates that the world-wide lack of literacy skills costs the global economy US$1.19 trillion each year. Individual countries, both developing and developed, have explored the cost of literacy challenges within their borders and the figures are frightening: inadequate literacy or a lack of literacy is not only ruinously expensive for the individual but for the society within which that individual resides.

Most of what I have read around the topic of literacy pertains to basic literacy skills. The definition of literacy as a concept is also under review. In a 2005 UNESCO report, the following, much lengthier and more sophisticated description (UNESCO is adamant that this is not a definition) of literacy caught my attention:

Literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, develop their knowledge and potential and participate fully in community and wider society.(UNESCO 2005:21)

This description is exciting but also divisive. How many young people and adults, currently considered literate in the more accepted sense of the word, would still be labelled literate based on this?

But the truth is if our students are to succeed in the twenty-first century world, we do need a broader, more enhancing vision of literacy. Recently I browsed through Future Work Skills 2020, published by the Institute for the Future, part of the University of Phoenix Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. Many of these sorts of reports and investigations are floating about at the moment and most of them, certainly the ones I have read, draw more or less the same sorts of conclusions about how we will work in the next few decades and what skills we will need in order to navigate these new worlds filled with new information. But what strikes me about the predictions these publications make is that they all require the same, basic skill.

Future Work Skills 2020 names concepts for the future work force such as Sense-making, Social Intelligence, Novel and Adaptive Thinking, Cross-cultural Competency, Computational Thinking, New-Media Literacy, Transdisiplinarity, Design Mind-set, Cognitive Load Management and Virtual Collaboration.  These are smart, exciting new labels designed to incorporate what is new and developing in our evolving world. But all of them, at their heart, have the ability to read – to predict, skim, scan, identify, infer, distinguish, evaluate, explain, interpret, motivate, analyse, respond, to consider socio-cultural and political values, attitudes and beliefs, and to evaluate how language may reflect and shape those values and attitudes. I am sure by now you are mouthing along with me as you recognise that I am quoting the key verbs from Learning Outcome 2, Reading and Viewing, in the IEB Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement. If our students are encouraged to read, not only for education, but for enrichment and enjoyment, of course they will (and I am quoting) be ‘able to express their identity, feelings and ideas, interact with others and manage their world’. Reading is not a future-anything skill – it is, it has and it always will be the single most important and life-enhancing ability we can offer our students anywhere in the world, at any time and in any environment.

Here is my concern, however, and it lies buried in the National CAPS document:

‘By the final phase of schooling, however, many of these activities [referring to reading] should need little emphasis: they have been part of the learner’s progress through preceding phases.’

This is where things could go horribly wrong. That assumption cannot be made. English teachers desperately need to engage with our students at every phase, urging them, motivating them and encouraging them to read for enjoyment by making reading accessible to them and by modelling the value and delight of reading through our own, personal reading habits. Reading will always need emphasis – teachers of senior phase students know that as well as teachers of foundation phase or primary phase. And often, for whatever reason, reading might not have been part of the learner’s progress through preceding phases.

In a Monitoring Learning Achievement surveyconducted in 25 145 South African schools in 1999, 22 101 schools had no space for a library, 3 388 had dedicated library spaces but not one book and only 1 817 schools had libraries with books. In other words, for the mathematically challenged of us, only 7 per cent of the schools surveyed had libraries.  A way around the absence of libraries is for teachers, especially in the primary phase, to have classroom collections for students to use – sadly, only 25 per cent of the schools offered this alternative.

Our government is very aware of the shockingly low literacy levels in this country and has devised a National Reading Strategy for South Africa; its vision reads: Every South African learner will be a fluent reader who reads to learn, and reads for enjoyment and enrichment. We must ensure that our students leave school as readers, preferably who read for pleasure, because the benefits of such an activity for the individual student and the society he or she will inhabit are almost immeasurable.  English teachers cannot assume that because a student can read, or has been a reader, he or she will continue to read without our support.

Believe it or not, as well as the heated debate around the words ‘literacy’, ‘illiteracy’, ‘low literacy’ and ‘adequate literacy’, there is academic debate around what we mean when we say ‘reading for pleasure’.  Other ways of putting this are ‘leisure reading’ (Greaney, 1980), ‘recreational reading’ (Manzo & Manzo, 1995), ‘voluntary reading’ (Krashen, 2004), ‘independent reading’ (Cullinan, 2000) and my personal favourite, ‘ludic reading’ (Nell, 1988) – I had to look up ‘ludic’: It means ‘spontaneous and playful’, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English!

Whatever we want to call it, reading for enjoyment is the reading we do of our own accord, because we want to. It can also refer to reading that we began at someone else’s behest, such as a teacher, but continued with because we became ‘hooked’ and wanted to carry on. Typically, reading for enjoyment will reflect our own choice of reading material – and this is a thorny area for English teachers because we need to allow choice (which has been proven to be a very important issue for teenage and senior primary readers) but within the confines of what we believe to be best for growing our readers.

Wanting our students to enjoy reading is not simply because we are passionate about the heart of our language, its literature, but because it has real, measurable benefits: in 2002 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development stated that ‘reading enjoyment is more important for children’s educational success than their family’s socio-economic status’. And Krashen adds, ‘When children read for pleasure, when they get ‘hooked on books’, they acquire, involuntarily and without conscious effort, nearly all of the so-called ‘language skills’ many people are so concerned about: they will become adequate readers, acquire a large vocabulary, develop the ability to understand and use complex grammatical constructions, develop good writing style, and become good (but not necessarily perfect) spellers. Although free voluntary reading alone will not ensure attainment of the highest levels of literacy, it will at least ensure an acceptable level. Without it, I suspect that children simply do not have a chance.’

But sadly, and this will not be a surprise, a lot of evidence is accumulating that a growing number of young people, especially between the ages of ten and fourteen, are not reading books for pleasure any more. They are reading – text messages, web pages and so on, but their choice of reading is veering away from fiction, and non-fiction has never really been a very popular genre for younger people anyway.  And teachers of boys will equally not be surprised to hear that boys tend to read less than girls and tend to enjoy it less, based on studies such as Clark and Foster’s in 2005.

As English teachers in well-resourced schools that doubtless have given much thought to our students’ reading,  we must continue to do everything we can to motivate reading and to encourage our students regardless of phase to embrace intrinsic and extrinsic reasons for reading.  Intrinsic motivation means that students read because they want to; thus they read more often and more widely; they enjoy it more; they retain more information and they are better able to persist with what they are reading. They see that reading is a valuable, important activity, they are curious to learn about a particular topic and they feel a sense of achievement at what they have mastered.

Extrinsic motivation to read means that students read because the activity is being imposed upon them, usually by their teachers. Extrinsic motivation is often linked to assessment or a task. Research (Deci et al, 1999, Wigfield and Guthrie, 1997) has discovered that extrinsically motivated students want their reading to be recognised, they want to receive a tangible reward; when reading for assessment, they want to earn good marks and they tend to read competitively – wanting to outperform other students.

Intrinsically motivated readers tend to have higher level thinking skills and to understand concepts better than students who read because they are forced to. But extrinsic motivation can be harnessed to bring about intrinsic motivation!

We must be able to answer the questions, ‘What should I read next?’ and most importantly, ‘What should I read?’ (Which usually in my experience, despite a collection of nearly 11 000 items in our library, follows the statement, ‘There is nothing to read.’) As busy, pressured English teachers trying to squeeze in reading for our own pleasure, never mind reading in order to motivate our students, sounds like an impossibly tall order. But there are ways of coping with the volume of new publications and authors that seem to come at us in a tsunami of texts. However we try to motivate our students to read for enjoyment, it is essential that they know we read for pleasure and that we share what we have read with them.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, also by C S Lewis, Lucy opens a magical book and we are told, ‘The longer she read the more wonderful and more real the pictures became …’.

Let’s cast a spell on our students… These are some suggestions of various ways to motivate our students to read (without trying to read every book that is published and managing to get 8 hours sleep a night). Modern life is certainly not all about Facebook and Twitter, but we need to accept that our students, especially our teenage students, are going to be using social networks and technology. This means we must try to meet them where they are and make their interests work for us. It is helpful if we can embrace some degree of technological savvy, without having to morph into Bill Gates…

• Set up reading programmes

At St Anne’s College we run two reading programmes: the Young Critics Award programme in Form 4 (Grade Ten) and the Battle of the Bookworms programme in Form 2 (Grade Eight). Both programmes run over approximately 15 weeks, both programmes are run closely in conjunction with the English department and both programmes are assessment-linked as well are reward-linked, to a greater or lesser extent.

Thus both programmes offer extrinsic motivations in the hopes of igniting intrinsic motivation to read – and they include that all-important aspect of choice, within broad parameters (YCA offers a list of twenty books; BoB offers a booklet running to 25 pages). Reading programmes are a lot of work to set up, but the rewards are as magical as Lucy’s book.

• Organise reading activities

These tend to work better at a primary school level than secondary school level, but anything is worth trying at any phase. These include reading games, reading groups, older, more confident readers helping younger children with reading, reading for prizes and other, creative reading activities. All research points to the fact that writing book reviews is the least welcomed reading activity!

 

• Set up displays (electronic and traditional)

Have a dedicated board in your classroom for latest book news, and in primary schools, offer reading nooks and corners – as well as classroom collections. Encourage your students to add material to your reading boards. Use technology if you can support it: book trailers are freely downloadable from YouTube, if you have somewhere to run them. QR codes are fun and easy to create – these can add a new dimension to your pleading for reading, as long as your students have smartphones and have downloaded the (free) app! If you have a classroom blog or a media centre blog use it as another platform to offer your students links. Use all the colleagues in your school – create READ posters of your colleagues holding up their favourite books and display these everywhere. Encourage all your colleagues to talk about their personal reading, not only the teachers of languages.

• Celebrate special days

Celebrate days that are linked to reading: International Mother Language Day, February 21, World Read Aloud Day, March 7^th, World Storytelling Day, March 21^st (the theme for 2013 is Fortune and Fate), World Book Day and Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, World Book Night is celebrated on the same day, only at night– there is a fantastic website and an exciting list of (mainly) senior reads each year. Let’s plan on bringing World Book Night to South Africa!

Look for the official websites of all of these occasions, sign up for the newsletters and begin planning special days for next year. Perhaps invite a professional story teller for World Storytelling Day? There is so much that can be done with the theme of Fortune and Fate in 2012 with primary school and GET phase students, especially. Research has shown again and again that everyone, children and adults, enjoys having stories read to them or told to them.

• Set up author contact / look up official websites, linked websites, webinars

There can be few things as exciting as live contact with authors. Now that we can Skype, it is a cheap option, but bring in live authors when feasible, link their talk to a point of sale and an autograph session. Most writers can be found online, via their official website.

There are so many ways to make a book come alive, for students of all ages. Webinars are online seminars, which are usually accessed by belonging to an online education forum or publication of some kind (membership is usually free).  Webinars can come at a cost but one that is considerably cheaper than flying somewhere for a week.

• Go to websites to help answer the question, ‘What should I read next?’

If you’re stumped, have your students register on Good Reads (www.goodreads.com).  There is a clever algorithmic test that readers can take for ten minutes or so, within the genres they have specified. Once the students have finished the ‘test’, the website, which is a jolly good resource anyway, suggests which books they should be reading next.  Good Reads has added their Good Reads for Facebook Timeline link, and in just under two weeks, Facebook readers the world over had added over a million books they had been reading! Shelfari (www.shelfari.com ) is also a goody.

Penguin South Africa has just launched The Wall(http://penguinbooks.co.za/young-adult-books)– if students ‘like’ the page, they have the chance to enter competitions, get books news and write their own reviews for others to read! (Facebook is not intended for users younger than 13.)

• Subscribe

Subscribe to the myriad of book news, blogs and letters online:  for example, lovereading4kids.  Read online book reviews from local and international sources. Subscribe to magazines such as The Good Books guide or follow them online.  Use online book stores too – you will be bombarded (in a good way) with useful information. Follow the literary prizes, too – the Man Booker is an obvious senior one with a fantastic website chock full of useful resources and information (www.themanbookerprize.com) but more junior ones include the Newbery, the Carnegie and the Greenaway medal.

• Use Twitter

Twitter (https://twitter.com/)  is not only about Justin Bieber – it is the most fantastic resource to follow your favourite authors, follow publishing houses and keep up to date with a myriad of book news. And before you groan and think that you get more enough to read every day, remember that Twitter is a micro-blogging service; the messages are only 140 characters long (including spaces) but you can add links or images. Set up a Twitter account that your (older) students can follow.

• Add yourself to bookshop mailing lists

In this way you can be invited to their book promotions and receive their new letters (this applies to e-books too). Many book stores are trying harder than ever to make p-books attractive, and you don’t need to live anywhere near the bookshop to benefit from the online newsletter.

• Encourage keen readers  to keep you informed

Let them tell you what they reading and what you need to be aware of – as a librarian, I encourage girls to tell me about books they think we must have and to give me the information I need to make an informed choice, which includes them.  My keen readers (and every school has them, you simply need to identify them) are an invaluable source of information.  And when you give your students a voice and they know it is being heard, that line of communication will never be closed again, even when the students move on.

• Set up cluster groups

We did not pursue this angle when I was part of cluster groups and teaching English, but it would work so well. We are in constant contact with one another about matters pertaining to assessment, teaching and learning and how we deliver the curriculum. Why not use those smaller, more intense groups to share recommended reading lists or ideas for reading activities, book programmes and assessments? A Twitter account in the cluster group’s name could be set up, for example, making communication fast and easy – straight to cell phones, short and to the point. Websites can be linked at the touch of a mouse.

 

The community of learning’s emphasis must fall on community.

The most important aspect of the latter part of this presentation is that we are not, as Lewis pointed out, alone.

To end then as I began – with a quote by one of my favourite authors, Dr Seuss, from his book, The Lorax:

‘Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, /Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.’

The status of English in a multilingual South Africa:

Gatekeeper or liberator?

 

Professor Rajendra Chetty, CPUT

 

In this paper, Professor Chetty argues that, instead of blaming poor literacy rates and academic performance on the fact that that learners in disavantaged communities are required to use English as their Language of Learning and Teaching, we should rather look to the low intake of teacher education students of indigenous languages at the Foundation Stage level to offer mother-tongue instruction, as well as the content and methology of the teaching of English (which in turn brings into the question the quality of the training of English teachers)..

 

 

This  paper analyses language politics in South Africa in an attempt to understand what is happening in multilingual classrooms. I humbly open this highly contested and ideological debate once again as I firmly believe that the language debate has to be more finely nuanced taking into consideration the realties of race, class and social marginalisation, together with the sensitivities of the language issue in SA and the unfortunate hegemonic stance taken against English.

Firstly, to contextual the debate, let’s look at how the past still informs the present with regards to compulsory mother-tongue instruction followed by circumscribed multilingualism

Education policy-makers in the 1950s made mother-tongue education a key principle of state policy, a move that may have been applauded, had the context of its implementation been different.

For practical reasons, African schoolchildren also had to have mastered a level of competence in the official languages, Afrikaans and English, that would make the country governable and ease communication in the workplace. African children therefore had to switch from mother tongue to English or Afrikaans for high school, a feat that research shows usually ensures barely functional competence in the target language.

In the context of the apartheid project, mother-tongue education was seen as part of a cynical strategy of divide-and-rule by diminishing access to the language of power, English, and lowering standards of education to ensure that African scholars were ill-equipped to participate in economic activity beyond manual labour levels. As apartheid education policy evolved and mother-tongue universities were established in ethnically defined regions, these institutions were widely seen by the African majority and their political activists as academically second rate, and tools of apartheid social engineering. Unsurprisingly, when ANC activists eventually returned from exile in the 1990s they advocated a single nationwide medium of instruction, English, and elimination of ethnic ‘bush’ tertiary institutions.It is evident that language was a contested factor to the apartheid discourse.

What are the language dynamics post 1994?

South Africans had to rethink their identities on a number of levels given the recent history of political freedom, economic liberalisation and social development. There is a sense in which this identity taking and identity formation in SA is a profoundly fraught experience. This is particularly the case with respect to race and class and it takes sharp expression in the language practices of individuals and groups. We see this clearly in young people’s use of language and the ways that they are schooled. The school system itself is complex in terms of language politics. The system that has emerged post 1994 is one where race has not gone away but has been significantly modified by social class. Permitted to charge school fees by the SA Schools Act, former white schools in particular have reconstructed themselves as schools for the new and expanded South African middle class. They have become racially diverse, which is an important development, but most of them have retained their elite identities. A Human Science Research Council study (Sekete et al. 2001, 27) shows that 60% of black and coloured children do not attend the school nearest to them, in other words, they actively evade them, informed by the manufactured desire for the school elsewhere. These children choose to access schools with English as medium of instruction because they regard it as crucial for cultivating the necessary aspirant dispositions that will allow entry into formal middle-class employment and lifestyles (see Fataar 2007a). A key question in this scenario as asked by the NEPI document in 1992 is: Has the enforced mother-tongue medium of instruction during apartheid cemented the view of African language medium education as inferior in the eyes of African parents?

Along with democracy in 1994 came a celebrated constitution enshrining 11 official languages, which both recognized and promoted South Africa’s de facto multilingulism. The consitituion is supportive of the ‘destabilisation of the hegemony of English’ and promotes the use of African languages in different domains of society. In alignment with this, the Dept of Ed’s Language in Education Policy promoted additive bilingualism, and the use of mother tongue as the language of teaching and learning in the early years of schooling.  However, this has not been successful in many cases, as no clear guidelines have been provided on how to implement the policy. Although the policy is potentially positive, many teachers, teacher education and parents wrestle with the consequences of handing over the responsibility for Language of Learning and Teaching policy formulation to school governing bodies, which are not adequately informed, trained or equipped to make such key decisions in disadvantaged contexts.  The language policy has had very little impact in practice. Rather, the status of English is growing, witnessed in its widespread use in high status domains of politics, the media and education.

The history of mother-tongue education in South Africa therefore makes language policy extremely complex, giving rise to baffling reactions from parents, to efforts to instantiate language rights in schooling. There is still a widespread suspicion among parents, especially the poor, that mother-tongue education will stifle their children’s aspirations for a better life. SGBs still choose English as the language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in more than half the schools in South Africa, although English is the home language of only 7% of the population. Linguists have yet to convince communities of the benefits of mother-tongue education, and crucially, the resources to support it have yet to be developed beyond basic levels of literacy.

The tragedy is that, having chosen English as the LoLT, the level of English offered and mastered in most schools still reflects inadequate functionality for meeting the aspirations of those wanting to move out of poverty. This may be partly attributable to the quality of learning in the mother tongue that has preceded the switch to English. There is a serious shortage of resources: qualified African mother-tongue foundation phase teachers, as well as a range of progressively conceptually challenging genres of children’s literature that facilitate engagement, vocabulary development, experience of alternative perspectives and world views, flexible use of language structures and modelling of text for different purposes.

To effectively support the acquisition of a first additional language as a language of learning, the learning in mother tongue must be richer than the level expected in the target language. The learner must be able to find the resources in the mother tongue to match the resources that have to be comprehended in the target language. If these resources are not available in the mother tongue, it is reasonable to conclude that the learner needs to be initiated into the Language of Learning and Teaching as early as possible, so that it becomes as effective for learning as a mother tongue should be.

Pinky Makoe found in her study of language discourses in a multilingual primary school that the value attached to linguistic competence in English renders some learners ‘successful’ and others unsuccessful. This means that competence in English as the language of learning and teaching is seen to be equivalent to a more favourable position of identity. Those who possess this kind of competence are privileged and engender more authority in relation to other learners.

The reality is that, although the significance of mother-tongue education is widely acknowledged and encouraged, it remains a thorny issue for most parents. This is especially so for African parents.

There is currently a great need to reinforce a critical literacy paradigm in the South African public education system given the socio-historical and political context. The unequal access to resources based on race and class continues to produce privilege as well as poor scholastic performance. Socially constructed patterns of power have been heightened, hence the need to understand the effects of power, the replacement of race with class, the lack of equity of access to public schooling and the need for redress at classroom level. For example, in 2006 a standard literacy test was conducted in all schools in the Western Cape. Ex-Model-C school learners achieved an 82.9% pass rate while in former coloured schools the rate was 26.6% and in black schools 3.7%. This is evident of the need to be more vigilant with our efforts to eradicate racism and entrench democracy. Less than 10% of public schools in South Africa have functional libraries of any kind (Department of Education’s 2007 NEIMS Report). These public schools that have libraries are the former model-C schools that are able to establish libraries and employ librarians through their own funds, collected through fees.

Children who grow up in communities that are embedded in orality develop different faculties with language, which although equally powerful resources for making meaning, are not equally valued by the school system when compared to middle class literacy norms (Heath, 1983). These children’s literacy abilities are not used as a resource in schools. Bordieu rightly points out that the school system privilege some children over others, hence marginalising the social capital of the children disadvantaged by the social system. School literacy is therefore not neutral. When we quote statistics with regards to literacy e.g. the Pirls test, we fall into the trap of what Street (1984) referred to as the ‘autonomous’ model of literacy, and we naively ignore the fact that literacy is not an issue of measurement or of skills but a social practice that varies from one context to another. In South Africa it is the context of learners who are privileged in terms of class versus those that are poor, disadvantaged and largely black.

Providing English knowledge is legitimate and it empowers learners. Good command of English will aid in minimizing socio-economic disadvantage, especially within the post-apartheid context of South Africa. English can also be seen as an attempt to unify a people susceptible to be divided along ethno-linguistic lines. In a sense one can argue that English equalizes our society. Ideally, because of our location on the African continent, an African language should be playing this role and indeed, current efforts to promote African languages into higher status functions should be encouraged. However, the fact remains that at least in the foreseeable future, English will continue to be a major language in this country and the world at large. One can therefore argue that imperatives for the foregrounding of English as language of teaching and learning should be examined so as to provide every South African child with an opportunity to master the language that might control his/her access to the means of socio-economic and educational empowerment.

I contend that those among us that are most vociferous about English as killer of other languages, who play the role of defenders of the victims of epistemic violence of the empire, ironically use only English in our righteous battle. One cannot leave one’s own baggage – or historical, geographic and class positioning – when encountering the marginalised and disadvantaged. What is advocated is critical negotiation from within, an engagement with and critique of hegemonic discourses and representations. We need to be vigilant of our politically correct denunciation of (neo)colonialism derived from an unexamined identification with, or benevolence towards, the subaltern (Moore-Gilbert, 1997:112). This acknowledgement of complicity (and complexity) also affects the way we address imperialism: while never underestimating its destructive impact, we should also recognise the positive effects too, in this case, the enabling violations of English (Spivak, 1994:277).

 

Is English a liberator or a gatekeeper?

I differ from Hilary Janks that African children’s learning and their sense of identity are compromised when they have to learn through the medium of English (2010:11). In fact, the struggle was not against English, but the forced use of Afrikaans as medium of instruction to maintain racial domination. Even in the promotion of African languages during apartheid, it was not a linguistic or language rights imperative, but rather a political tool of the regime to foster ethnic divisions and to keep black learners away from English which was a language of power and access. As a form of literacy redress, we should be advocating good quality English education that integrates both the linguistic and social capital of African children.

The ability of South Africans to communicate in English facilitates the evolution of a nation state. English is the language of the state and government documentation appears mostly in English. From the perspective of Bourdieu (1993) this represents cultural capital. English is therefore central to those who wish to succeed within the parameters of state-sanctioned power. Those who have good command of both English and an African language stand even a better chance of success. It is therefore not surprising that as early as 1991, the NEPI report shows that significant numbers of black parents have opted for English for their children, even from the first year of primary school (NEPI 1991:13f).

We would be highly irresponsible if we did not give learners mastery of English, and this in no way advocates the marginalisation of other languages. Together with mastery of English, we need to provide a critical view of the status of English as a global language (Granville et al, 1998). Linguistic diversity should be fostered. The social interest at work here is empowering black learners with the dominant linguistic capital of the country so that they benefit and they are advantaged in the school and higher education system. It is ironical that it is mostly white learners who only have English as a language and most black children speak African languages at home. Yet, the linguistic debates have centred on the deficiency of African children not knowing English and not on white children not being able to speak an African language. More realistically, learners who do not have an African language in South Africa are deprived of the opportunity for meaning construction within the African context that forms their life world.

English does not perpetuate the privileged status of an elite class, on the contrary, English promotes structural-economic development and social inter-group and inter-personal interactions, vital components for reconciliation and growth in a new democracy. In spite of postcolonial critique by language activists, English does not regulate and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources between groups as South African speakers of English are not defined on the basis of language. All South Africans have access to English and an indigenous language. As such they may decide to claim any of the official languages as theirs.

Also, it is fiscal reasons that restrict the appointment of new language teachers to ensure the implementation of the language policy. Language policy seems to have simply moved African languages from the margin to the centre (on paper only) as a form of redress and there has been little training of African language teachers. Of serious concern is the low intake of teacher education students at foundation phase level to offer mother-tongue instruction in indigenous languages. What is needed is a concerted programme to ensure quality intake for teacher training and an effort by the state to reduce material inequities in schools as a step to attract quality teacher education students. The quality training of language teachers is unfortunately not foregrounded as there are more serious issues within the complexity of teacher education to be addressed.

Teachers are unwilling to embrace new methodologies and the concern is more around credentialism as opposed to gaining new knowledge in the increased interest in in-service programmes. Universities too, played the neo-liberal game by awarding certificates without adequate re-training of teachers as the concern was more on marketisation and massification. It is therefore not strange that in recent literacy tests in this province, it was found that the teacher knowledge was not much higher than learner knowledge in primary schools. The findings of this study are still embargoed through pressure by the teacher unions. The situation is very complex as it is not only the learner literacy levels that need to be addressed, but also the literacy of the teachers. There has been little retraining of teachers with regards to the multilingual nature of open schools (pre-1994 South African schools were largely segregated). English second language learners are marginalized and silenced in such contexts due to poor language teacher preparation, not due to English as language of instruction.

There should be greater accent on cognitive/academic language proficiency in the training of teachers, along with the reconceptualisation of the role of languages in teaching and learning. Language courses are limited to archaic pedagogics and consist of formal aspects of language, limited literature study and basic communication in English. The silences in these language courses include semantics and functional meaning, academic language proficiency, pragmatic aspects of proficiency, bilingualism and code-switching.

Meaning construction (Freire 1971), a theory fundamental to critical literacy, is the basis of context-embedded teaching, especially within post-colonial contexts. The teacher has to be trained to encourage learners to negotiate meaning and interpret texts. In her study of language and learning science in South Africa, Probyn (2006) concluded that teachers indicated a strong preference for English as the language of teaching and learning. The lack of training in teaching in second language was evident and teaching resources were limited. Teaching cannot be done in a language in which the teacher does not have an appropriate level of mastery.

The contextual frame that continues to condition English teaching in post-colonial contexts is scary and must be addressed in teacher training:

–          Pedagogy is based on European models;

–          The most prevalent teaching methodology is the transmission mode;

–          The prescribed texts are drawn from predominantly middle-class, high-culture positions;

–          Classrooms are characterized by a polarity between first language and second language speakers whose cultural capital is excluded;

–          A culture of silence results from non-mother-tongue based learners losing confidence. (Ashworth and Prinsloo 1994:125-126)

The move should be towards creative literacy. If learning to read and write is to constitute an act of knowing, the learners must assume from the beginning the role of creative subjects. It is not a matter of memorising and repeating given syllables and phrases, but rather of reflecting critically on the process of reading and writing itself, and on the profound significance of language (Freire, 1972a). Much of the curriculum reform in English education thus far was simply altering a reading list. Of course there was also the doomed educational experiment with OBE and countless reviews that had limited impact on the country’s literacy levels.

The implication of a critical literacy approach will shift the focus from listening and reading to reading and creation. Learners have for too long been taught to read and understand. Reading for the creation of texts has been ignored, perhaps historically because of its political implications. Incidentally, much of the literacy tests focus on writing through answering contextual type questions. There is a lack of emphasis on writing in the school programme, yet the testing of writing skills is foregrounded in literacy tests and this raises questions around validity of the scores.

If it is to be a ‘liberator’, English should be a resource to be appropriated and owned by all, not just the elite, to be used as a gateway to the wider world. For this to happen, creative solutions (and massive expenditure) would have to be applied to the teaching of English, particularly in the township and rural schools. If well managed, mastery of English in disadvantaged settings may be an invaluable tool of exchange between those living on the margins of society and those who are part of the global village.

Conclusion

A relevant language curriculum within a post-colonial context has to take into cognizance not only the local cultural diversity but also the global store of knowledge that characterizes the heterogeneity of our common humanity. Edward Said notes accurately the predicament of a racial and ethnic version of cultural nationalism:

To assume that the ends of education are best advanced by focusing principally on our own separateness, our own ethnic identity, culture and traditions ironically places us where as subaltern, inferior, or lesser races we had been placed by nineteenth-century racial theory, unable to share in the general riches of human culture.

The search for relevant knowledge (like English), should go beyond repudiating the west in favour of recovering and reconstructing Africa’s cultural heritage.  Concomitant with that, we have to be extra vigilant of the west with their politically correct denunciation of English as neo-colonialism and our own colleagues who continue to see English from a hegemonic lens. This benevolent stance towards African languages may be seen as patronising and ill-informed. We agree that we need to address imperialism and the destructive impact English has had on indigenous languages. However as Spivak maintains, we need to recognise the positive effects of English and see it as an enabling violation.

Two Yeats poems

(Adapted from an article published by S K King, in CRUX, April-June 1972)

 

The Wild Swans at Coole

It will perhaps be difficult for children to appreciate this poem fully. It shares the general sorrow that the most beautiful things cannot be kept; but most of all it expresses a personal sorrow at the poet’s loss of youth. Yeats sees again after nineteen years the wild swans which seem never to lose life, strength or beauty; ‘passion or conquest’ ‘attend upon them still’, and his own loss of these very things must come home to the poet. ‘All’s changed’ for him since that time he ‘trod with a lighter tread’.

The poem has that perfection which makes it appear simple, and only on reflection does one see how much the packed, yet seemingly easy language implies. This anyone must soon appreciate – how much, for instance, the first stanza suggests – the colour, the stillness (and the poet wandering through it) of the paths round the lovely lake, full, cool, with its reflections. Everything is put so simply that there must be delight in dwelling on the lines to get their full impression. What is not so immediately apparent is the masterly movement of the lines. The stanza form has been built by Yeats exactly for this purpose, and is so perfect that the speaking of the poem deserves an infinite care to get the intended rhythm. I know of no other poem which surpasses it in this. There is a constant definiteness of emphasis in a movement mostly slow, without any roughness, all quiet, yet intense. The long third and fifth lines of each stanza are demanding, and anyone with an ear would delight in getting them right.

The whole poem demands a slow deliberation, even the lines which describe the swans’ movements, strong and sure of purpose.

 

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

A point that one needs to be careful about with this poem is the emphasis. The poem fundamentally is about the love of life (as all Yeats’ poetry is) and Yeats and the Irish Airman into whose experience he invites us, are not at all dwelling on ‘death’.

It is exulting in the thrill of flying –  its danger and challenge to the whole man. ‘This death’ is consciously there, but not primarily. It comes last in the poem, and it is ‘this life’, the fullness of living in the adventure of flying a war plane, that has made anything else seem ‘waste of breath’. Every word in the poem needs to be given its weight – what for instance ‘waste’ implies about the possibilities of ways of living. It is illuminating to read Yeats’s other poem about the same Irish airman, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’.

DICTIONARIES UP FOR GRABS!

 

In the last issue of TET, we included the following announcement:

LONGMAN HAVE DONATED 10 DICTIONARIES TO READERS WHO SEND AN EMAIL TO THE EDITOR (DR MALCOLM VENTER, drv@worldonline.co.za) GIVING,  IN NO MORE THAN 50 WORDS, A TIP ON HOW TO USE DICTIONARIES IN THE CLASSROOM.  PLEASE INDICATE WHAT GRADE LEVEL THE TIP IS AIMED AT. THE FIRST TEN TO SEND IN THEIR ENTRIES WILL RECEIVE A FREE DICTIONARY AND CD ROM.  PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR NAME AND POSTAL ADDRESS.

 

Well, in the end we received three entries – and the authors will shortly be receiving a copy of this very attractive and functional dictionary. Here are their suggestions:

 

 Children like to play

Grade 4 learners could use the dictionary as a FUN GAME. The teacher could have a list of words (one at a time) and ask learners to look up the words from the dictionary. Learners may work in pairs or individually. The learners who get the word first are allocated points. After 5-10 words, the groups’ scores are calculated and the one with the highest score wins. This may be repeated amongst different groups of learners.

Gregg Masondo, North West Province

 

‘A dictionary on every desk!’

When I was a teacher, it was an English class rule: A dictionary on every desk! When a child came to class, the dictionary had to be put on the desk. Every child knew the teacher’s answer if they asked how to spell a word, ‘Use your dictionary!’

Richard Hayward, Gauteng

 

‘Balderdash’

An adaptation of ‘Balderdash’ works really well with high school grades. (It’s the original pre-board game.) Team leader chooses a word. Everyone writes own definition.  Team leader reads all definitions including the correct one. Points  scored for guessing correct definition, and for being chosen.  Reinforces dictionary components and style.

Nicci Hayes, Eastern Cape

ARTHUR MILLER’S THE CRUCIBLE

Dr Barbara Basel

A presentation at a workshop for teachers in May 2012

I’ve decided to focus on three aspects of this play:

1.         Why did Miller write The Crucible – the circumstances and reasons?
2.         Three of the main themes in The Crucible.
3.         Three of the main characters in The Crucible

I will provide some theoretical background first and then suggest some ways in which students could be assisted towards a deeper understanding of these aspects of the play

 

THE REASONS MILLER WROTE THE PLAY

LIFE IN POST WORLD WAR II AMERICA

Miller’s The Crucible, was written in 1953 to expose the horrors of ‘McCarthyism’. It is a play that deftly examines ‘the work of the individual conscience when pitted against the uniform thinking of the mob’ (New Yorker).

According to Miller, ‘the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience.  However, drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us know more, and not merely evoke our feelings.’ (‘Introduction to Miller’s Collected Plays’.)

As a result of heightened fears of the communist influence on American institutions and espionage by Soviet agents during the 1940s and 1950s, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy and his supporters used charges of communist sympathies or disloyalty to attack a number of politicians and other individuals inside and outside of government.  Suspects had to defend themselves before the House of Un-American Activities Commission and the identities of their accusers and even the nature of many of the accusations were typically kept secret from the accused. The term ‘McCarthyism’ was subsequently used to describe the making of accusations of disloyalty, subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence. (A practice that mirrors the treatment of the accused in the Salem witch trials of 1692.)

Elmer Davis, a highly respected news reporter, warned that ‘McCarthyism’ constitutes a ‘general attack not only on teachers, textbooks, schools, colleges and libraries, but on the freedom of the minds’ of all Americans.  Justice William O. Douglas stated that McCarthy’s purge was ‘based on a principle repugnant to our society, namely guilt by association, which is typical of what happens in a police state’.

Such were the conditions in American when Miller wrote The Crucible, a play which uses the 1692 Salem witch trials as a metaphor for ‘McCarthyism’, thus suggesting that ‘McCarthyism-style’ persecution can occur at any time or place. The play focuses on the fact that, once accused, a person would have little chance of acquittal, given the irrational and circular reasoning of both the courts and the public. One of the aspects that prompted Miller to write The Crucible; was exploring ‘the tragedy of people who, under social pressure, lose their integrity’. The Crucible explores this theme in the context of the Salem witch trials. Many citizens of Salem lost their sense of decency and community when they went along with the crowd to continue the persecution of the innocent.   Miller stated later that: ‘The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in America in the 1950s’. 

Miller’s The Crucible depicts trial scenes in which children accuse adults of evil abuse in a fury of fanaticism and paranoia. Similar scenes are replayed in historic documentaries about Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution in the People’s Republic of China.  In more recent years in Africa, a similar form of mass hysteria fired the 1994 Rwandan Genocide in which over 800,000 people died because, according to the Hutu Power group, ‘the Tutsi intended to enslave the Hutu’. This genocide was supported by the national government, local military and civil officials and the mass media.

Miller spent hours studying the testimonies of the participants in the Salem trial. He was particularly interested in the testimony against a farmer named John Proctor who was executed for conspiring with the Devil. Miller discovered a connection between Abigail Williams and the Rev. Parrish and that both were somehow linked to John and Elizabeth Proctor. There were sexual innuendos throughout the transcript. So Miller introduced the fictionalized adulterous relationship between Proctor and the young Abigail in order to create the necessary dramatic energy and provide the reason for Abigail to accuse Elizabeth of witchcraft. Miller became attached to his characters and to the real people they represented. He marvelled at Rebecca Nurse, Giles Corey and John Proctor who ‘could have such a belief in the rightness of their consciences as to give up their lives rather that say what they thought was false’.

 

LIFE IN THE AMERICAN COLONIES AT THE END OF THE 1600s

In 1689, the Puritans of Salem Village were finally allowed to form their own covenanted church congregation and ordain their own minister. Salem Village was torn by internal disputes between neighbours who disagreed about the choice of Samuel Parris as their first ordained minister, and about the choice to grant him the deed to the parsonage as part of his compensation. (In The Crucible the Rev. Parris frequently alludes to the fact that it has taken him ‘2 long years to gain the support of the community’, while John Proctor challenges Parris over his request for the deeds of the parsonage.)

 

Religious and political context

The Puritans were a political and religious party which began in the mid-16th century in England. The party opposed the doctrine of the Catholic Church and accused the new Protestant Church of England of continuing to follow Catholic traditions. Tension between Catholics and Protestants continued throughout the 1600s until England erupted into civil war, and the leaders of the Puritan Party executed King Charles I and made their leader, Oliver Cromwell, ‘Lord Protector’ of England in 1653. This success was short-lived and the resultant emigration of Puritans to Massachusetts in the US produced a population of fervently religious and politically astute settlers.

 

Social context

The Puritan community was a patriarchal society. They believed women should be subservient to men, and that women were more likely to enlist in the Devil’s service because women were lustful by nature. The ‘small-town atmosphere’ made secrets difficult to keep, and people’s opinions about their neighbours were generally accepted as fact. Children were at the bottom of the social ladder and girls were trained from a young age to perform household duties, serve their husbands and bear their children.(In The Crucible, Abigale Williams and her friends, Mary Warren and Mercy Lewis, all worked as ‘servants’  in the homes of Salem villagers.)

 

In accordance with Puritan beliefs, the majority of accused ‘witches’ were unmarried or recently widowed land-owning women. According to the law if no legal heir existed upon the owner’s death, title to the land reverted to the previous owner, or to the colony, thus making witch-hunting a means of acquiring a profitable piece of property.(Giles Corey accuses Thomas Putman of persuading his daughter to ‘call out’ for a witch so that he could purchase her property.)

 

Economic context

Increasing family size fuelled disputes over land between neighbours and within families, (such as those between Thomas Putnam and Giles Corey). Such quarrels were further enhanced by the religious fervour of the Puritans (Proctor was condemned for ploughing on Sunday). Consequently, loss of crops, livestock, and children, as well as earthquakes and bad weather, were attributed to the wrath of God. (Ironically, the death of Ruth Putman’s eight children is said to be the work of the devil.)

 

The Witch Trials and McCarthyism

The Crucible can be seen as symbolic of the paranoia about commof  Un-American Activities Committee’s rooting out of suspected communists during this time and the seventeenth-century witch-hunt that Miller depicts in The Crucible, including the narrow-mindedness, excessive zeal, and disregard for the individuals that characterise the government’s effort to stamp out a perceived social ill.

Just as had happened with the alleged witches of Salem, suspected Communists during McCarthy’s ‘reign of terror’ were encouraged to confess their crimes and to ‘name names,’ identifying others sympathetic to their radical cause. Miller’s main concern in The Crucible is not whether the accused are actually witches, but rather with the unwillingness of the court officials to believe that they are not. This was a matter of concern in Miller’s own time due to the fact that the excesses of McCarthyism had wronged many innocents.

 

QUESTIONS

In order to assist learners to better understand the context in which The Crucible was written ask them to identify and research the following issues:

• Countries, societies and religious communities in which the freedom of ordinary people is curtailed by those in power – namely by political and religious leaders.  Try to get learners to identify both past and present societies which exhibit repressive power structures, (eg Germany, Communist countries, South Africa).
• Countries and societies in which the repressive power structures have enabled the leaders to become wealthy at the expense of the poor, (eg Liberia, Zimbabwe, Eqypt).
• Countries and societies in which religious, ethnic and/or political fervour has lead to loss of life, (eg Afganistan, Sudan, Baltic States, Croatia, Rumania, etc).

 

2.       THREE OF THE MAIN THEMES IN THE CRUCIBLE

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. I will discuss three themes although there are others.

Intolerance

The Crucible is set in a theocratic society, in which the church and the state are one, and the form of religion is Puritanism, a very strict and ridged form of Protestantism.

• In a theocratic society moral laws and state laws are fused, thus the whole community is concerned with the status of an individual’s soul.
• Everyone must conform to established moral and social norms: thus any individual whose private life does not conform to the society’s norms represents a threat to both the public good and to the rule of God.
• In Salem, everyone belongs to either God or the devil; dissent is both unlawful and associated with satanic activity. As Danforth says in Act III, ‘a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it.’
• The witch trials are an expression of intolerance, hanging witches is the means of restoring the community’s purity; the trials brand all social deviants as devil-worshippers and necessitate their expulsion from the community.

Hysteria

The Crucible highlights the role hysteria plays in tearing apart a community. Hysteria thrives when people benefit from it. It suspends the norms of daily life and allows the manifestation of dark desires under the cover of righteousness. In The Crucible:

• Hysteria supplants logic and enables people to believe that their supposedly moral neighbours, are committing unbelievable crimes such as working with the devil or killing babies.
• The townsfolk become active in the hysterical climate for religious reasons and because it gives them a chance to express repressed sentiments and to act on long-held grudges. For example:
  –           Abigail uses the situation to accuse Elizabeth Proctor of witchcraft in the hope that she can marry John Proctor.

–           Reverend Parris strengthens his position within the village by making a scapegoat of Proctor who questions his authority.
–           The wealthy, ambitious Thomas Putnam revenges Francis Nurse by getting Nurse’s virtuous wife Rebecca convicted of the ‘supernatural murders’ of Ann Putnam’s babies.

Empowerment

In The Crucible the witch trials empower several marginalized members of Salem society. In general, women occupy the lowest rung of male-dominated Salem and have few options in life. They work as servants for townsmen until they are old enough to be married off and have children of their own. In addition to being thus restricted, Abigail is also slave to John Proctor’s sexual whims—he strips away her innocence when he commits adultery with her, and he arouses her spiteful jealousy when he terminates their affair.

Because the Puritans’ greatest fear is the defiance of God, Abigail’s accusations of witchcraft and devil-worship immediately command the attention of the court. By pretending to align herself with God’s will, she gains power over society, together with the other girls in her pack, and their words become virtually unassailable. Tituba (Parris’s Barbados slave), who has the lowest status in the play because she is black, deflects blame from herself by accusing others.

 

QUESTIONS:

In order to assist learners to better understand the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in The Crucible ask them to identify and research the following issues:

• Intolerance

Societies and religious communities in which intolerance of other people’s ideas is common practice by both leaders and ordinary citizens. Ask learners to think about intolerance in their own communities, schools and extended families, (eg xenophobia in South Africa, intolerance towards people who are HIV/AIDS positive).  Ask learners to think of the results of such intolerance and to suggest ways in which it could be overcome.

 

• Hysteria

The Oxford English Dictionary defines hysteria as ‘wild, uncontrollable excitement, volatile emotions and overdramatic behaviour with physical symptoms such as unconsciousness and convulsions that cannot be attributed to physical pathology’.  Ask learners if they can identify situations in which logic has been supplanted by volatile emotions and overdramatic behaviour, for example when seemingly peaceful demonstrations by community members or street vendors turn into volatile situations in which people are injured and property is damaged.  How could such situations have been avoided?

 

• Empowerment

The empowerment of previously marginalised people is usually regarded as a positive action.  However, while The Crucible shows how the women of Salem used their empowerment positively, it also reveals the way in which it impacted negatively on society.  Ask learners to think about ways in which many women in today’s society have overcome their submissive position and then get them to discuss both the positive and negative results of this empowerment.

 

3. THREE OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS IN THE CRUCIBLE

John Proctor

The Crucible’s structure is similar to a classical tragedy, with John Proctor as the play’s tragic hero. Honest, upright, and blunt-spoken, Proctor is a good man, but one with a secret, fatal flaw. His lust for Abigail Williams led to their affair (which occurs before the play begins), and created Abigail’s jealousy of his wife, Elizabeth, which sets the entire witch hysteria in motion.

Once the trials begin, Proctor realizes that he can stop Abigail’s rampage through Salem if he confesses his adultery. Such an admission would ruin his good name, and Proctor is, above all, a proud man who places great emphasis on his reputation. He makes an attempt, through Mary Warren’s testimony, to name Abigail as a fraud without revealing the crucial information. When this fails, he bursts out with a confession, calling Abigail a ‘whore’ and proclaiming his guilt publicly. Only then does he realize that it is too late, that matters have gone too far, and that not even the truth can break the powerful frenzy that he has allowed Abigail to whip up. Proctor’s confession succeeds only in leading to his arrest and conviction as a witch, and though he verbally attacks the court and its proceedings, he is also aware of his terrible role in allowing this fervor to grow unchecked.

Proctor redeems himself and provides a final denunciation of the witch trials in his final act. Offered the opportunity to make a public confession of his guilt and live, he goes as far as signing a ‘confession’. While initially, his immense pride and fear of public opinion compelled him to withhold his adultery from the court, by the end of the play he is more concerned with his personal integrity than his public reputation. He still wants to save his name, but for personal and religious reasons. Proctor’s refusal to provide a false confession is a true religious and personal stand. Such a confession would dishonour his fellow prisoners, who are brave enough to die as testimony to the truth. Perhaps more relevantly, a false admission would also dishonour him, staining not just his public reputation, but also his soul. By refusing to give up his personal integrity Proctor goes to the gallows redeemed for his earlier sins. As Elizabeth says to end the play, responding to Hale’s plea that she convince Proctor to publicly confess: ‘He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!’

Abigail Williams

Abigail is a very beautiful seventeen-year-old girl and one of the major characters in the play. Abigail is the least complex character in the play and her rather static nature does not change through the play.  However, Abigail is clearly the villain of the play; she tells lies, manipulates her friends and the entire town, and eventually sends nineteen innocent people to their deaths. Throughout the hysteria, Abigail’s motivations never seem more complex than simple jealousy and a desire to have revenge on Elizabeth Proctor. Abigail is driven only by sexual desire and a lust for power. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out a few background details that, though they don’t mitigate Abigail’s guilt, make her actions more understandable.

Abigail is an orphan and an unmarried girl, whose only relative, Rev. Parris, begrudgingly gives her a home. She thus occupies a low rung on the Puritan Salem social ladder (the only people below her are the slaves, like Tituba, and social outcasts). For young girls in Salem, the minister and the other male adults are God’s earthly representatives, their authority derived from on high. The trials, then, in which the girls are allowed to act as though they have a direct connection to God, empower the previously powerless Abigail. Once shunned and scorned by the respectable townsfolk who had heard rumours of her affair with John Proctor, Abigail now finds that she has clout, and she takes full advantage of it. A mere accusation from one of Abigail’s troop is enough to incarcerate and convict even the most well-respected inhabitant of Salem. Whereas others once reproached her for her adultery, she now has the opportunity to accuse them of the worst sin of all: devil-worship.

Reverend Hale

John Hale, the intellectual, naïve witch-hunter, enters the play in Act I when Parris summons him to examine his daughter, Betty. Miller describes Hale as ‘a tight-skinned, eager-eyed intellectual. This is a beloved errand for him; on being called here to ascertain witchcraft he has felt the pride of the specialist whose unique knowledge has at last been publicly called for.’ Hale enters in a flurry of activity, carrying large books and projecting an air of great knowledge. Initially Hale is the force behind the witch trials, probing for confessions and encouraging people to testify. Over the course of the play, however, he experiences a transformation, one more remarkable than that of any other character. Listening to John Proctor and Mary Warren, he becomes convinced that they, not Abigail, are telling the truth. In the climactic scene in the court in Act III, he joins those who are opposing the witch trials. In tragic fashion, his about-face comes too late—the trials are no longer in his hands but rather in those of Danforth and the theocracy, which has no interest in seeing its proceedings exposed as a sham.

The failure of his attempts to turn the tide renders the once-confident Hale a broken man. As his belief in witchcraft falters, so does his faith in the law. In Act IV, it is he who counsels the accused witches to lie, to confess their supposed sins in order to save their own lives. In his change of heart and subsequent despair, Hale gains the audience’s sympathy but not its respect, since he lacks the moral fibre of Rebecca Nurse or John Proctor. Although Hale recognizes the evil of the witch trials, his response is not defiance but surrender. He insists that survival is the highest good, even if it means accommodating oneself to injustice—something that the truly heroic characters can never accept.

QUESTIONS:

In order to assist learners to better understand the main characters in The Crucibleask them to identify at least 3 good and 3 bad points in each character and to say which characteristics are the most dominant and the affecs this has on the development of the play.

• The characters of Proctor and Rev Hale are said to change during the course of the play.  Do you agree with this statement? Give reasons for your answer.  What impact does this change have on both the character and the action of the play.
• Some commentaries say that Abigale is ‘the least complex character in the play and her rather static nature does not change throughout the play.  Ask students to comment on this, and to explain why they agree or disagree with this description.

 

The following questions are taken from http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/crucible/themes.html:

 

Study Question 1. Discuss the role that grudges and personal rivalries play in the witch trial hysteria.

The trials in The Crucible take place against the backdrop of a deeply religious and superstitious society, and most of the characters in the play seem to believe that rooting out witches from their community is God’s work. However, there are plenty of simmering feuds and rivalries in the small town that have nothing to do with religion, and many Salem residents take advantage of the trials to express long-held grudges and exact revenge on their enemies. Abigail, the original source of the hysteria, has a grudge against Elizabeth Proctor because Elizabeth fired her after she discovered that Abigail was having an affair with her husband, John Proctor. As the ringleader of the girls whose ‘visions’prompt the witch craze, Abigail happily uses the situation to accuse Elizabeth and have her sent to jail. Meanwhile, Reverend Parris, a paranoid and insecure figure, begins the play with a precarious hold on his office, and the trials enable him to strengthen his position within the village by making scapegoats of people like Proctor who question his authority.

Among the minor characters, the wealthy, ambitious Thomas Putnam has a bitter grudge against Francis Nurse for a number of reasons: Nurse prevented Putnam’s brother-in-law from being elected to the Salem ministry, and Nurse is also engaged in a bitter land dispute with one of Putnam’s relatives. In the end, Rebecca, Francis’s virtuous wife, is convicted of the supernatural murders of Ann Putnam’s dead babies. Thus, the Putnams not only strike a blow against the Nurse family but also gain some measure of twisted satisfaction for the tragedy of seven stillbirths. This bizarre pursuit of ‘justice’typifies the way that many of the inhabitants approach the witch trials as an opportunity to gain ultimate satisfaction for simmering resentments by convincing themselves that their rivals are beyond wrong, that they are in league with the devil.

Study Question 2. How do the witch trials empower individuals who were previously powerless?

Salem is a strict, hierarchical, and patriarchal society. The men of the town have all of the political power and their rule is buttressed not only by law but also by the supposed sanction of God. In this society, the lower rungs of the social ladder are occupied by young, unmarried girls like Abigail, Mary Warren, and Mercy. Powerless in daily life, these girls find a sudden source of power in their alleged possession by the devil and hysterical denunciations of their fellow townsfolk. Previously, the minister and the girls’ parents were God’s earthly representatives, but in the fervor of the witch trials, the girls are suddenly treated as though they have a direct connection to the divine. A mere accusation from one of Abigail’s troop is enough to incarcerate and convict even important, influential citizens, and the girls soon become conscious of their newfound power. In Act II, for instance, Mary Warren defies Proctor’s authority, which derives from his role as her employer, after she becomes an official of the court, and she even questions his right to give her orders at all.

Even the most despised and downtrodden inhabitant of Salem, the black slave Tituba suddenly finds herself similarly empowered. She can voice all of her hostility toward her master, Parris, and it is simply excused as ‘suggestions from the devil.’ At the same time, she can declare that she has seen ‘white people’ with the devil, thus (for the first time in her life, probably) giving her power over the white community. As the fear of falling on the wrong side of God causes chaos during the brief period of the hysteria and trials, the social order of Salem is turned on its head.

Study Question 3. How does John Proctor’s great dilemma change during the course of the play?

Proctor, the play’s tragic hero, has the conscience of an honest man, but he also has a secret flaw—his past affair with Abigail. Her sexual jealousy, accentuated by Proctor’s termination of their affair, provides the spark for the witch trials; Proctor thus bears some responsibility for what occurs. He feels that the only way to stop Abigail and the girls from their lies is to confess his adultery. He refrains for a long time from confessing his sin, however, for the sake of his own good name and his wife’s honor. Eventually, though, Proctor’s attempts to reveal Abigail as a fraud without revealing the crucial information about their affair fail, and he makes a public confession of his sin. But by the time he comes clean, it is too late to stop the craze from running its course, and Proctor himself is arrested and accused of being a witch.

At this point, Proctor faces a new dilemma and wrestles with his conscience over whether to save himself from the gallows with a confession to a sin that he did not commit. The judges and Hale almost convince him to do so, but in the end, he cannot bring himself to sign his confession. Such an action would dishonor his fellow prisoners, who are steadfastly refusing to make false confessions; more important, he realizes that his own soul, his honor, and his honesty are worth more than a cowardly escape from the gallows. He dies and, in doing so, feels that he has finally purged his guilt for his failure to stop the trials when he had the chance. As his wife says, ‘he have his goodness now.’

Essay Topics

1. Compare the roles that Elizabeth Proctor and Abigail Williams play in The Crucible.

2. What role does sex, and sexual repression, play in The Crucible?

3. Why are Danforth, Hathorne, and the other authorities so resistant to believing the claim that Abigail and the other girls are lying?

4. What kind of government does Salem have? What role does it play in the action?

5. Analyze Reverend Parris. What are his motivations in supporting the witch trials?

6. Discuss the changes that Reverend Hale undergoes in the course of the play.

 

Quiz

1. What kind of government does Salem have in The Crucible?

(A) Democracy    (B) Theocracy     (C) Monarchy       (D) Kleptocracy

2. What is Parris’s position in Salem?

(A) Governor        (B) Judge (C) Minister         (D) Bailiff

3. Before the play begins, what did Parris catch his daughter and other girls doing?

(A) Trying to run away from home          (B) Dancing in the forest

(C) Reading Catholic tracts         (D) Conducting a black mass in the church

4. Why did Elizabeth Proctor fire Abigail?

(A) Abigail was too proud.                             (B) Abigail didn’t work hard enough.

(C) Abigail dressed like a prostitute.        (D) Abigail was having an affair withJohn Proctor.

5. As the play opens, whom has Parris asked to come to Salem?

(A) Judge Danforth          (B) Reverend Hale          (C) Tituba (D) John Proctor

6. What is John Proctor’s chief complaint against Parris’s sermons?

(A) They focus too much on fire and brimstone.            (B) They are too long.

(C) They are heretical.                 (D) They are too short.

7. What does Mrs. Putnam blame on witchcraft?

(A) Her husband’s cancer           (B) The death of seven of her children in infancy           (C) Bad weather                (D) Raids by natives

8. Who is the first person that Abigail claims practiced witchcraft?

(A)Tituba (B) John Proctor (C) Reverend Hale  (D) Mary Warren

9. In Act II, what does Mary Warren give to Elizabeth Proctor when she returns home from the trials?

(A) A cake            (B) A bonnet         (C) A kiss (D) A little doll

10. What news does Mary Warren bring from Salem?

(A) That someone accused Elizabeth of witchcraft

(B) That the witch trials have ended                    (C) That Reverend Hale is ill

(D) That someone accused John Proctor of witchcraft

11. Which commandment does John Proctor forget when Reverend Hale quizzes him?

(A) Thou shalt not kill.                              (B) Thou shalt not commit adultery.

(C) Honor thy mother and father.                        (D) Thou shalt not covet.

12. Whom do Ezekiel Cheever and Herrick, the marshal, come to the Proctor home to arrest?

(A) John Proctor  (B) Reverend Hale (C) Mary Warren (D) Elizabeth Proctor

13. To what does John Proctor convince Mary Warren to testify?

(A) That the girls are only pretending to be possessed  (B) That Abigail is a witch

(C) That Hale is a warlock           (D) That he and Abigail slept together

14. Who is in charge of the court?

(A) Giles Corey    (B) Danforth         (C) Hale                (D) Parris

15. Why will Elizabeth not be hanged if she is found guilty?

(A) Because she is a woman (B) Because the Puritans do not allow capital punishment (C) Because she is pregnant           (D) Because John Proctor is well respected

16. On what charge is Giles Corey arrested?

(A) Witchcraft       (B) Murder            (C) Contempt of court (D) Slander

17. When Mary Warren testifies against them, what do Abigail and her troop of girls do?

(A) They all confess.        (B) They claim that Mary is bewitching them.

(C) They attack her.         (D) They claim that John Proctor has bewitched Mary.

18. What does John Proctor do, in a desperate attempt to foil Abigail?

(A) He tells the court about his affair with her. (B) He accuses her of witchcraft.

(C) He tries to kill her.      (D) He tells the court that Abigail is a man dressed as a woman.

19. Who is brought in to corroborate John Proctor’s claims about Abigail?

(A) Elizabeth Proctor (B) Rebecca Nurse (C) Mary Warren (D) Parris

20. What does Elizabeth do when called upon to testify?

(A) Keeps silent   (B) Tells a lie (C) Tells the truth        (D) Kills herself

21. What does the court do with John Proctor?

(A) It frees him and sends him home.     (B) It orders him stoned to death.

(C) It exiles him to Maine.                        (D) It arrests and tries him for witchcraft.

22. When John Proctor is facing death, what does Hale urge him to do?

(A) Kill himself      (B) Blame someone else (C) Refuse to confess

(D) Confess, even though he is innocent

23. Why does Proctor retract his confession?

(A) Because the officials demand that he sign his name to it     (B) Because Hale asks him to (D) Because Abigail confesses    (D) Because new evidence has come to light

24. What does Abigail do at the end of the play?

(A) She kills herself.         (B) She flees Salem, after robbing her uncle.

(C) She is hanged.           (D) She is revealed as a witch.

25. What ultimately happens to John Proctor?

(A) He is freed. (B) He kills himself. (C) He is hanged.

(D) He escapes from prison and flees to Virginia.

“Pity like a naked new born babe” – the key Speech in Macbeth

 

Professor Peter Titlestad

 

The texts are Act 1, vii, 1-28 and Act 2, iii, 67-81.

 

Many people are puzzled by Macbeth’s speech about “pity like a naked new born babe.” Even when they realize that the speech may have something to do with the Apocalypse, there are still difficulties with some of the details.

The Apocalypse is what is described in the final book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation. This book has given rise to numerous pictorial representations of Doomsday, and it is in these pictures as much as in the text that the clues to understand Macbeth’s speech lie. There was such a  Doomsday picture painted on the wall of Shakespeare’s parish church in Stratford-on-Avon. The most famous, of course, is Michaelangelo’s The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel but one can guess that Shakespeare had not seen this particular one.

The speech starts with a metaphor of time as a “bank or shoal” surrounded by the limitless sea. Time is only a small, finite entity, it is not endless. Time will end. All around is eternity. The end of time is signalled by Doomsday, the Second Coming of Christ to judge the dead. This will involve the separation of the sheep and the goats, of the saved and the damned. These pictures show Christ sitting in judgement showing the wounds in his hands and side: his blood is part of the standard imagery of these pictures. Around him fly the Cherubim (traditionally depicted as naked infants) blowing trumpets. The graves have opened, the dead have arisen and those on Christ’s left hand, the damned, are dragged down to hell by devils while those on the right hand are the saved. Such pictures are intended to terrify the viewers and disturb their consciences. Macbeth’s speech is the utterance of the disturbed conscience of a man brought up in this tradition of iconographic teaching. Will he make the right decision, will he be among the sheep or the goats?

The speech is an anguished, terrified and deeply but confusedly imaginative meditation on the results of his planned murder of King Duncan. Angels will “plead trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation of his taking off.” What one does on the little bank or shoal of time has consequences for all eternity. The following phrase merges a number of ideas in Macbeth’s  excited and disturbed mind. He should have pity on Duncan, a naked new born baby should excite pity, but the babe in this case is also one of the Cherubim riding the wind and blowing blasts on the trumpet that declare the horror of his contemplated deed and the judgement that will follow.

A pictorial representation of the crucified Christ in Shakespeare’s day was called a “pity.” The representation of Doomsday was called a “doom.” Later, Macduff is to call the sight of the murdered King the “great doom’s visage” and liken this blood to the precious blood of Christ. He tells Malcolm and Banquo “as from your graves rise up” evoking the picture of the opening of the tombs on judgement day.

Macbeth has only “vaulting ambition” which he, at this moment, realizes “o’erleaps itself” to spur him on. He knows what he should do. He tells his wife “we shall proceed no further in this business” but then gives in to the viscous tongue of a young woman, quite possibly a very glamorous one, who has already given herself to evil and who wants to be Queen. She says that she would dash out the brains of a baby: so much for “pity like a naked new born babe”!

Macbeth is a study of conscience disregarded and of the ever-worsening consequences that follow on an evil decision, for Macbeth becomes a tyrant and the killing never stops. It is also one of Shakespeare’s many and varied studies of the relations between a man a woman.

KING LEAR

Professor Colin Gardner

This article is based on a talk presented by to a school audience.

All Shakespeare’s play are remarkable, but many would regard King Lear is perhaps the most remarkable of them all. An amazing amount of value – narrative and dramatic power, human knowledge and insight, sheer poetry – is packed into this play, which on the Elizabethan stage would have taken about three hours to perform.

The play has two plots or stories, though these two plots become more and more intertwined as the play proceeds.  And the two plots are similar in various ways, and each serves to echo the other and to reinforce the point of the other story. The main plot tells us of King Lear, who in a fit of anger banishes his good daughter Cordelia and his friend the Duke of Kent, and then is cruelly treated by his evil daughters Goneril and Regan. The second plot (or sub-plot) tells us of the Duke of Gloucester, who together with his son Edgar is deceived and cruelly treated by his illegitimate son Edmund. Shockingly badly treated though they have been, Kent in disguise manages to help Lear, and Edgar in disguise manages to help his father Gloucester.

Set out in those terms, the play is clearly skilfully constructed and organised, but as one encounters the play – reads it and fully imagines it –one realises that there is nothing neat and certainly nothing predictable about it all. In fact, besides being very dramatic, the play is very complex.

I am going to ask myself a number of questions:

1. We know that Cordelia is good, but is she really right to challenge her father in the way she does in the opening scene?
2. Lear is rash to banish Cordelia and Kent. Could we say that he gets what he deserves? And what of Gloucester?
3. What do we make of the Fool?
4. Why does Edgar behave as he does as he acts out the part of poor Tom?
5. How should we respond to and interpret Lear’s madness? What sort of wisdom does he acquire? And what of Gloucester?
6. What do we make of the play’s ending?

 

1.   We know that Cordelia is good, but is she really right to challenge her father in the way she does in the opening scene?

Cordelia simply finds that she is appalled by the insincere statements made by her sisters. She has no desire to indulge in that kind of flattery, and she knows instinctively that her father is being vain and self-indulgent to demand these statements of love. After all, you show your love of your father by the way you act, by what you are – and Lear, in his more sensible moments, has been aware of this because he clearly has a special affection for Cordelia. Cordelia’s honesty and integrity simply don’t allow her to play her father’s foolish game. Besides, she has two potential suitors waiting for her, and she is perfectly sensible and reasonable to say: ‘Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, / To love my father all.’

 

2.   Lear is rash to banish Cordelia and Kent. Could we say that he gets what he deserves? And what of Gloucester?

It’s clear, then, that Lear behaves badly in the opening scene. He is old; he has been king for a long time; he seems to have grown used to people looking up to him and flattering him and obeying his wishes. He has a terrible temper tantrum, and this leads him to reject his favourite daughter and to banish Kent, who clearly honours the king and likes him. Should we conclude then that the moral of the play (if the play can be said to have a simple moral) is that if you do something wild and rash you may well suffer for it for the rest of your life, and that you have only yourself to blame? I think the play does suggest this up to a point – after all, there is no doubt that Lear does in a sense ‘ask for it’ – but no, that is not the main point of the play, not at all. King Lear is a tragedy, and one has only got the real meaning of the play when one recognises that tragedy involves suffering that is undeserved and ultimately inexplicable. When a person does something wrong and gets duly punished for it: that’s what one might call a morality play, or a crime-does-not-pay story. But a tragedy is when the main character suffers in a way thatcan’t be explained: it is for this reason that tragedies are plays which lead us to ask further questions about life and the universe in which we live. Is the universe just? How do we explain evil? You will probably have noticed that there is a good deal of talk about God and the gods – by Lear, by Gloucester, by Edgar. That’s because the suffering endured by Lear and Gloucester, and by others, leads us to ask questions of this sort.

Lear himself, at one of those moments where we trust what he says, makes the point that he doesn’t deserve what is happening to him. He says: ‘I am a man / More sinned against than sinning.’ He recognises very well that he has done wrong, but what is happening to him is disproportionate, far greater and more terrible than anything that he could have deserved.

As Lear rages in the storm, and when his mind finally snaps, he is constantly asking this question: How can his two daughters be like this? How can we explain the evil that seems to animate them? How can we account for the harsh realities that bear down upon human life? When Lear asks Poor Tom (whom at that stage he is regarding as a learned philosopher) – when he asks ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ the question perhaps sounds stupid but it is in fact a serious question. He is not looking for a scientific answer, of the kind that scientists could give nowadays, but he is wondering what it is in the nature of the universe which produces the violence within lightning and thunder – and of course in the scenes on the heath in the dreadful storm the wild forces of nature seem to collaborate with the wild cruelty of Goneril and Regan and Cornwall and Edmund.

I say Lear asks these questions about suffering and evil and violence and justice, but of course Shakespeare is using Lear and the whole play to ask these questions for himself. An artist like Shakespeare uses his play as a way of probing, as a way of trying to come to terms with some of the most difficult questions and problems posed by human existence. That, we can be pretty sure, is largely why Shakespeare wrote this play. He was of course a professional dramatist, and he needed to produce plays for his company to act, and he loved the stories that he found and remoulded for his own purposes, and he created characters with exuberance and obvious pleasure. But at the same time his plays are all about the meaning of human existence. That is why they are so powerful and have lasted so well. That is why you in 2011 are studying this play which was written more than 400 years ago. I have said that Shakespeare used Lear and the whole play as a way of tackling profound and important questions and problems for himself. But of course it was also, and just as much, for his audience, and for us, for we are his audience now, after all these years.

You are a young audience. You have all had many life experiences, some of you far more than others of course, but still at your age most of you haven’t got round to asking all the questions that one might ask about human life and about human beings. Some of the questions and problems that this play asks are ones that may well not have occurred to you before. But it’s well worth following Shakespeare’s lead, his train of thought and the emotions that he evokes. As you get older (and I have the right to say this, as I am quite old!) – as you get older you will realise more and more the value of the things that a play like this one offers.

One could say much more of course.But so much for Lear. What of Gloucester? He is a somewhat weaker, somewhat more passive character than Lear; Shakespeare couldn’t allow the main character in the sub-plot to dominate the main character in the main plot. But Gloucester is also represented as having sinned: in his case it is partly by having a child out of wedlock. He is also, like Lear, guilty of judging his children badly: he is deceived by the evil Edmund into turning against his good son Edgar. But with him it is equally clear that the suffering that he undergoes is disproportionate; and he like Lear wonders painfully about the nature of the universe and the gods. Lear’s suffering is largely inward, though he does have to endure the storm. Gloucester’s is inward too, but it is also extremely physical: he has his eyes gouged out.

 

3.    What do we make of the Fool?

Well, as you have probably been told, the Fool used to be a feature of many royal courts and noble households. The fool or court jester hung around in order to entertain people, to lighten the atmosphere, but he was also allowed to criticise the monarch – though he had to be careful not to go too far in what he said.

The Fool in this play certainly makes jokes and speaks in riddles, as jesters often did, and he is sharply critical of the King in his rash decision to hand his kingdom over to his daughters, whom the Fool knows to be deceptive and likely to be very cruel. The Fool’s remarks often seem cynical: for example, he laughs at Kent for following Lear when it’s clear that Lear is in for a rough time (to say the least). But beneath his witty and cynical surface, the Fool is a person with a strong affection for Lear, for all his faults, and he also has strong and sound moral values.

But why, one might ask, does he keep up his battery of satirical jokes? Why does he pursue and criticise Lear so relentlessly? We as the audience may well be puzzled by this as the play proceeds, but after a while it becomes obvious that the Fool feels that Lear must be made to face up to reality and must be made to recognise what a thoroughly bad decision he has made. In this desire to help Lear and not to flatter him the Fool is similar to Cordelia and to Kent.

As Lear comes to realise what he has done, and as he becomes enraged and maddened by the behaviour of his daughters, the Fool’s jokes and often peculiar sayings form an odd accompaniment to Lear’s growing intensity. Together the two of them, their two voices, produce a strange and memorable music.

 

4.    Why does Edgar behave as he does as he acts out the part of poor Tom?

And then of course, in the storm scene, another very strange voice is added to the music – that of Poor Tom. Many of the things that he says are even more weird than what we hear from the Fool. There is something phantasmagoric, something dreamlike and nightmarish, about the scene, with the storm beating down, and Lear, as he goes into his spell of madness, being surrounded by two  odd characters who both seem mad too.

Edgar, remember, had to disguise himself. His angry and deceived father ordered him to be hunted and killed on sight. He couldn’t even leave the country, as people at every port were put on the lookout for him. So he had to take on a convincing disguise, and once disguised he had to play the part effectively. Edgar throws himself into the role, and really seems to become Poor Tom the wandering mad beggar.

But what he says isn’t mere nonsense: Edgar finds himself talking obliquely about his own situation and about what is going on in the lives of those around him. He pictures himself as being pursued by the Foul Fiend, and of course he is in a situation where he is indeed being pursued by evil forces that he doesn’t really understand. He also sees human life very decidedly in moral terms, in terms of good and evil, and that is what the play as a whole invites us to do.

In the course of the play Edgar takes on more than one disguise, and with his occasional asides we are aware that he is intensely concerned about everything that happens – just as Kent, also in disguise, is at every point intensely concerned.

 

5.   How should we respond to and interpret Lear’s madness? What sort of wisdom does he acquire? And what of Gloucester?

This is a huge topic, which I am going to have to deal with quite briefly. What we see happening in the first half of the play is Lear’s intense anger and then despair as Goneril and Regan gradually undermine first his royal status and then his dignity as a man and a father, stripping him of his followers and finally allowing him to go out into the storm.  As the Fool says, and as I have said, he has partly brought all this upon himself – as he becomes deeply aware of this – but what happens to him is far vaster and more terrible than anything he could have deserved.

He soon begins to feel himself going mad. All the things that make up reality for him collapse, and his mind and emotions just cannot cope with it all. Things become blurred and topsy-turvy in his mind. But this collapse of normality within his mind also paradoxically opensup his mind. He becomes aware of things that he had never thought of before. As he moves towards madness he becomes compassionate. Looking at the largely naked Poor Tom he sees things about human beings that he hadn’t considered before. And he comes to recognise that many people live in poverty, and that somehow poverty should be alleviated. I wish I had time to quote and analyse some of his speeches at these moments in the play. He becomes aware of the ways in which rich people can cover up their crimes, while poor people easily get condemned. He is even prepared to understand sinners and pardon their sins. What has happened is that, partly in reaction against the shocking unkindness of Goneril and Regan, Lear has come to recognise the sheer value of goodness.

All this prepares him for the great moment when he wakes up from a long sleep after his spell of madness and sees Cordelia before him. He feels guilty and kneels before her, but of course she won’t let him do this. She loves and honours him. Fresh clothes have been put on to him while he was asleep. Gentle music is playing. It’s a sublime moment, one in which tragedy is transformed into harmony.  But of course this isn’t the end of the play

Gloucester, always something of an echo of Lear, goes through a similar process of learning, of understanding. He too becomes compassionate. He says, ‘I stumbled when I saw.’ He is now blind, but he sees many things more clearly than he did before.

 

6.    What do we make of the play’s ending?

I am referring to the very end of the play. For much of the last big scene we see the triumph of justice over injustice, of good over evil. Goneril, Regan and Edmund all die, in miserable circumstances. The firm and decent Albany comes to the fore. Edgar and Kent, both heroic characters, are able to reveal themselves. We seem perhaps to be heading towards a relatively happy ending.

And then Lear appears, holding the dead Cordelia, and cries out ‘Howl, howl, howl! O you are men of stones!’ The death of Cordelia is a terrible shock to Lear, a shock that kills him. But it is a shock to us too. Why should such a marvellous person be put to death? Clearly the forces of tragedy and evil are still operating. And then Lear dies. His last speeches are full of meaning, but perhaps ambiguous meaning. Does he die in despair or with some sort of hope in him? And how do we see his death? Does it seem to seal the fact that evil has triumphed after all? Or do we feel that the peace and joy that Lear achieved with Cordelia was a real triumph of its own?

Ever since the play was written people have argued and disagreed about the ending. How do we take it? There is no doubt that the moment is solemn and awe-inspiring: the final words of Kent and Edgar make this clear. It is tragedy indeed, what the poet Yeats called ‘tragedy wrought to its uttermost’.  But does tragedy overwhelm us with despair or does it leave us with a renewed humble sense of the mystery of human life?

My own view is that, terrible as the ending is, it’s not just a matter of despair. And I remember the constant parallel with Gloucester, whose heart, Edgar tells us, ‘burst smilingly.’

NOTICEWORTHY NOTICES!

Here are some interesting notices that could be used in teaching:

 

CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS

In a health food shop window

For teaching ‘owing to’ and ‘due to’ – if you want to bother!

 

ELEPHANTS PLEASE STAY IN YOUR CAR

In a safari park

For teaching punctuation.

 

SLOW CATTLE CROSSING. NO OVERTAKING FOR NEXT 100 YARDS

On a road

Also for teaching punctuation.

 

THE FARMER ALLOWS WALKERS TO CORSS THE FIELD FOR FREE, BUT THE BULL CHARGES

In a field

For teaching ambiguity

 

WILL THE PERSON WHO TOOK THE STEP LADDER YESTERDAY PLEASE BRING IT BACK OR FURTHER STEPS WILL BE TAKEN

In an office

Also for teaching ambiguity.

 

MEN RECOMMEND MORE CLUBS FOR WIVES

In a newspaper

A further one for teaching ambiguity.

 

WANTED: MAN TO TAKE CARE OF COW THAT DOES NOT SMOKE OR DRINK

In a newspaper

For teaching ambiguity caused by  misplaced clauses.