If students want to read the plays in their entirety, they would have to do it on their own time, taking the books out of school libraries or purchasing them. But why bother? Students can just go to a cable TV station or turn on their smart phones to get much more explicit material than found in Shakespeare’s plays. “There’s some raunchiness in Shakespeare,” Joseph Cool, a reading teacher at Gaither High School, told the Tampa Bay Times. “Because that’s what sold tickets during his time.”
Cool said he understood that the district’s school board members had to play it safe under the new laws, but he told the newspaper that the curriculum changes come at a price. “I think the rest of the nation—no, the world, is laughing at us,” he said. “Taking Shakespeare in its entirety out because the relationship between Romeo and Juliet is somehow exploiting minors is just absurd.”
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sign of the times
It’s implied in the tragedy that the two star-crossed teenage lovers have sex after secretly getting married. In one scene Juliet’s age is described as just shy of her 14th birthday—which was the marriage age for girls in Elizabethan England with parental consent.
King's College London's professor of Shakespeare studies, Dr. Sonia Massai, told Newsweek that using excerpts rather than the full plays was short-changing the district’s high school students. "I can understand that extracts and shortened texts can be more practical for younger children but from high school it is important to read the text and to do so slowly and chronologically as they [the plays] are carefully constructed and reading only in part can distort your perception of the text, and prompt a different interpretation than if you read it in full," Massai said.
The Tampa Bay Times said the school district’s spokesperson issued a statement explaining that the instructional guides for teachers had been redesigned “because of revised state teaching standards and a new set of state exams that cover a vast array of books and writing styles.”
“It was also in consideration of the law,” said school district spokeswoman Tanya Arja, referring to the newly expanded Parental Rights in Education Act. The measure, promoted and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, tells schools to steer clear of content and class discussion that is sexual in nature unless it is related to a standard, such as health class.
The new legislation limiting classroom materials that “contain pornography or obscene depictions of sexual conduct” has had a chilling effect on public school educators in Florida. The Tampa Bay Times wrote this about the advice being given by the school board to teachers in Hillsborough County: “Teachers are advised, during class lessons, to stay with the approved guidelines, which call for excerpts. If not, in extreme circumstances, they might have to defend themselves against a parent complaint or a disciplinary case at their school.”
School districts like Hillsborough have chosen to err on the side of caution as a result. Last month, the school board in Orange County, which includes Orlando, restricted four plays by Shakespeare, including “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” for use only in grades 10 through 12.
But just to indicate how confused the situation is in Florida heading into the new school year, State Education Commissioner Manny Diaz earlier this week put “Romeo and Juliet” on his list of books that he is recommending that students read in August, the Associated Press reported. Diaz said in a statement that his August book recommendations “provide a variety of reading materials that students will find uplifting and will spark a love for literacy.”
where it all began
What’s happening in Tampa stems from two laws that DeSantis pushed through the Republican-controlled legislature over the past two years. In 2022, DeSantis, who is seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, signed what became known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which prohibited classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in elementary school grades. A second law passed in 2023 extended these prohibitions to all other grades through high school. The bill also made it easier for people to file challenges against school books.
Those bills led the Florida Department of Education recently to discontinue Advanced Placement Psychology in high schools because the College Board, which administers the course and exam, refused to omit material about gender identity and sexual orientation from the curriculum.
And public schools were also impacted by the so-called “Stop WOKE” bill passed last year, which mandated that students should not be instructed to “feel guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” due to their race, color, sex, or national origin.
That led the state Department of Education earlier this year to reject an Advanced Placement course covering African American studies. And more recently, the state DOE adopted controversial new standards for teaching African American history, which included instruction on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Hillsborough County School Board Member Jessica Vaughn, who has been targeted by DeSantis for defeat in the 2024 election, posted a warning about efforts by the DOE and state legislature to destroy public education. “Honestly, it feels that much of this is intentional, in order to cause as much chaos in public education as possible, so that the collapse of public education is swift and the agenda of education privatization can move forward with less obstacles,” Vaughn wrote on Facebook, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
The bans are bad enough, but now Florida officials are trying to include historically inaccurate and racist videos in public school curriculum. Laura Clawson reported Monday that the videos are from PragerU, an organization founded by right-wing talk radio host Dennis Prager.
And DeSantis is going along the lines of what Russian President Vladimir Putin has been doing since launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Washington Post wrote that Russian authorities “have passed new education laws, revised school textbooks and introduced teaching guides that help teachers deliver `patriotic’ lessons.”
desantis is not shakespeare’s first foe
Fortunately, in his day, Shakespeare had to deal with Queen Elizabeth I. The Virgin Queen was the dominant leader in what was still a very patriarchal society in which women were considered inferior to men and mostly stayed at home raising their families. The educational website FinchPark wrote that the queen enjoyed Shakespeare’s plays and he even acted before her at Greenwich. So it is not surprising to find that some of his plays were centered around smart cross-dressing heroines.
The Finch Park story noted:
Of the thirty-eight surviving plays attributed to Shakespeare, about one fifth involve cross-dressing. In seven of those plays female characters disguise themselves as young men. In three – The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night – cross-dressing is central to both the complication and the resolution of the plot. The heroines also disguise themselves as men in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, and in Cymbeline, one of his latest. In The Taming of the Shrew and in The Merry Wives of Windsor male characters are disguised as women.
Shakespeare’s works often had the female roles in the Elizabethan theater played by adolescent boys, so things could get complicated. The Bard of Avon wrote about all aspects of human life, including sex. So just try to sort out the pastoral comedy “As You Like It”: A young male actor plays the role of a young woman, Rosalind, who disguises herself as a young man, Ganymede, for protection upon venturing into the forest. Ganymede runs into the man she loves, Orlando, and then poses as Rosalind so that the couple can act out their relationship. Meanwhile, a female shepherdess, Phoebe, has become smitten with Ganymede.
Actually, from early on, Shakespeare’s works were subject to censorship. Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company noted: “Early editions of Shakespeare’s plays sometimes ignored or censored slang and sexual language. But the First Folio [published in 1623] reveals a text full of innuendo and rudeness.” The RSC offered some choice examples of slang and sexual language in Shakespeare’s plays that basically would be incomprehensible to Florida high school students.
King's College professor Massai also noted to Newsweek that a 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s poems swapped pronouns in the sonnets from male to female in order to “conform to heterosexual norms of the time.”
And then along came the Puritans—the parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell—who outdid DeSantis. In an article on “The Banning of the Bard,” on the Online Library of Liberty website, author Gary McGath wrote:
After Shakespeare’s death, the Puritans rose to power, deposing and executing Charles I. In 1642, Parliament banned the performance of plays in England. Shakespeare’s works, along with those of other playwrights, could no longer be seen on the stage. The Puritans denounced the “lascivious mirth and levity” of stage plays. Theaters, including the Globe, were closed or converted to other purposes.
In fact, as McGath noted, the name of Thomas Bowdler has become part of the common language for his efforts to create a “family friendly” version of Shakespeare’s plays, taking out the cursing and crude humor—hence the term ”bowdlerization,” which certainly applies to what is happening today in DeSantis’ Floridistan.
But as McGath concluded: “His work has survived many attempts to silence it, and today it’s performed almost everywhere. The desire to censor is as universal as Shakespeare’s themes, but he has won out many times.”
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