I have no doubt that reading all that Shakespeare
and Chaucer along with old hero poems like Beowulf at The University
of Michigan certainly enhanced my life. It greatly affected my 11-year
stint as a journalist for The Detroit News, as well as my ongoing
roles as mother of two sons, wife, and schoolteacher.
I can’t imagine anyone considering himself an educated person without having read at least Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, preferably in their original antique English, or at least in the modern translations.
With no apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, let me count the ways that my English literature background has enhanced my life:
I know for a fact that reading all that old literature made me a highly sought after team member in college games of Trivial Pursuit. I was always First Draft pick (which almost made up for being the last one picked for sports teams in middle school). Nowadays my college chums tell me that I would be their literary lifeline choice if they were ever to become a contestant on TV’s "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." Now that right there makes suffering through the folk epic Beowulf in Anglo Saxon seem worthwhile.
And just between you and me, my English background has brought me lucrative work in recent years from people (who shall remain nameless) who wanted me to ghost write their doctoral dissertations. They perceive me to be a good writer by virtue of my having actually read all those five-act Shakespearean plays, which I keep on permanent display in my home.
Had I never read Hamlet, I would probably not have seen how Disney ripped off Hamlet’s plot for the movie Lion King (oops, I am a Disney stockholder). Think about it: in both works, the father figure appears in ghost-like form to relay messages to the son, who then procrastinates but eventually acts on what his father tells him.
Similarly, had I not read Romeo and Juliet, I would not have noticed that Disney’s Lion King II, Simba’s Pride, is also a recycling of the Romeo and Juliet plot with its forbidden love affair between lion cubs from rival dens.
When I read Shakespeare, I realize that men have been interested in two main things all these years: power and sex. And most men want them both together, not just one or the other. From the deceitful King Claudius to the deceitful Bill Clinton, the chief interests have been the same all along. You could argue that this is an oversimplified understanding of men, but after my own forty years or so on this earth and three marriages, so far I think not.
Reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was probably the second richest literary experience I ever had, second only to Hamlet. Of course, the Canterbury Tales needs to be read under the tutelage of a fine teacher to be fully understood. Fortunately, I had Professor Thomas Garbáty to walk me through Chaucer in the original Middle English so that I could more fully appreciate the poetry of the couplets.
Mostly, I remember that he had a true love of the literature he was teaching and that he did not tackle the "Miller’s Tale" with us. The "Miller’s Tale" was the one tale about which I had heard the most before ever cracking the book. The scandalous reputation of the "Miller’s Tale" preceded it like the reputations of Madonna or O.J. Simpson or Puff Daddy precede them. I remember Professor Garbáty telling us that we should read that one on our own. He piqued my interest, thereby encouraging me to continue my literary education outside of the formal classroom, and it worked.
I did read the bawdy "Miller’s Tale" on my own and found it to be a wonderful character study and an amusing piece of writing that contrasted well with Chaucer’s other tales, particularly the "Nun’s Priest’s Tale" and the "Prioress’s Tale."
But it was the Wife of Bath’s tale inside of the Canterbury Tales that affected me most profoundly. She was the extremely likable Chaucer character who was married five times. Her tale about what women really want in life was thought provoking and humorous.
Those who have read it know that in the end, the story says that women really want control over their husbands or lovers. I am not sure if that’s entirely true in my case, but I was intrigued by how the Wife of Bath revealed in her prologue that she was highly manipulative in her relationships with men and how the husband she loved most was the one she could manipulate the least.
Mostly, I loved how the tales that one character told in the Canterbury Tales would take pot shots and parry off of other characters in the book. Professor Garbáty helped me see how Chaucer was criticizing the church with his Canterbury Tales, and he gave me an appreciation for the whole structure of the book – a frame story of stories within a story.
To this day – more than twenty years after first reading the Canterbury Tales with Professor Garbáty - the description of the various characters Chaucer created stays with me. Why do I remember, for example, that the Wife of Bath was gap-toothed, or that the Miller had garlic breath?
But even these tales had their moments when my attention waned. I was bored with parts of the "Knight’s Tale," and I understand that that’s because the knight himself was supposed to be accomplished but boring. And God knows we have all suffered through other people’s long-winded talks, and hopefully this essay isn’t one of them.
So where am I going with this? I guess my point is that The Canterbury Tales is such a masterpiece that everybody should read it, at least in part. It is to literature what the Mona Lisa is to painting, and what Babe Ruth is to baseball and what Thomas Garbáty is to teaching.
It’s of course impossible to read The Canterbury Tales in its entirety because Chaucer died before he finished it. Yet, the issues addressed in the tales he wrote are very relevant to the New Millennium. The "Nun’s Priest’s Tale," for example, is that familiar fable of the rooster Chauntecleer and how he fell prey to false flattery. The moral of the tale is still useful today. And the "Prioress’ Tale" about religious intolerance is also still relevant to today’s world in light of humanity’s recent attempts at "ethnic cleansing" in the Mideast and Hitler’s not-that-long-ago attempt to exterminate the Jews. It seems painfully obvious that we humans can put a man on the moon and a telescope in space, but we can not eradicate man’s inhumanity to man. As for the "Merchant’s Tale," the problems associated with older men marrying much younger women play themselves out in the headlines on a daily basis.
Antique literature helps us see that humans have changed very little over the ages. We may use different means to express ourselves in the New Millennium – the Internet, fax machines, computers - but we in the New Millennium still wrestle with the same issues that plagued characters like Beowulf, Prince Hamlet, Desdemona, the Wife of Bath, and even Chauntecleer hundreds of years ago.
Let me digress to say that for a few years of my life in the mid ‘80s I penned a gossip column for the Detroit News called "Yours Truly." It was filled with frivolous but entertaining items about celebrities on both the local and the national scale. Some of my targets included crooner Willie Nelson, auto aristocrats Edsel Ford II and John DeLorean, Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, and Soul Queen Aretha Franklin. I also recall writing about boxing legend Muhammad Ali, then-Pistons hoopster Isaiah Thomas, and former President Jimmy Carter, to name a few. I covered the fashion glitterati as they traipsed through Detroit to promote their wares, including designers Nicole Miller and Bill Blass.
I mention this writing stint as a gossip columnist because it gave me access to the celebrities by which our times are defined. For the purposes of the gossip column that I wrote, I did not engage in deep conversations with them. We talked more about things and people than we talked about ideas. We had what I could call cocktail banter, during which I would ask Willie Nelson softball questions like who braids his hair and whether that was actually a joint he was smoking during our interview. (He says he does the braiding and that yes, it was marijuana). And of former President Jimmy Carter, I asked where he would prefer his daughter, Amy, to go to college (Brown University).
Could I have interviewed these celebrities even about such light topics without ever having read Beowulf or King Lear? Could I have later written the "Grape Expectations" wine column for The Detroit News without ever having memorized the first 100 lines of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English? You may think so, but I’m not so sure.
Here’s why: I firmly believe what William Wordsworth wrote in his poem "My Heart Leaps Up." He wrote that "The child is father of the man," meaning that it is the experiences of the child that make the man. The child Diane Hofsess existed years before the adult Diane Hofsess. The experiences that shaped the adult Diane included brushes with Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Chaucer, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Christopher Marlowe, and Robert Herrick. Those experiences made up the me that applied at the Detroit News and was hired by then-publisher Ben Burns. He saw the me that had been shaped and molded by all that I had experienced through literature and life before he ever met and hired me.
Any cook knows that an extra clove of garlic in a recipe, small as a clove may be, can have a significant effect on the final product. In the making of a human being, the same is true of the addition of an idea from another Shakespearean sonnet or Chaucerian tale to the mind. We are unquestionably shaped by what we have experienced, both through literature and life.
So I doubt that I would have written the same stories that I wrote for The Detroit News or asked the same questions of people I interviewed or even have been hired by the paper if I had been raised with a different literary background. I may never have even elected to go into journalism if I had not been down the literary paths that I had taken or had never read any Mark Twain or Hemingway (both journalists at points in their lives). And I may never had understood the satire in Bill Blass’ comment about how "black is the newest (fashion) color every year" if I had never studied satire in Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.
I know that I have learned a great deal from the old literary characters. I am thinking right now of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He rose to the top through evil means, and when he got there, he realized that he still was not happy. He realized he had none of those things that he felt should accompany old age "as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends" (Act V, scene III, lines 29 and 30). These are the things Macbeth longed for and did not have. These are the things I already have in my midlife, thanks to the grace of God and to a few outstanding literature teachers, foremost among them Professor Thomas Garbáty.
Besides Macbeth, I have learned from Portia in The Merchant of Venice, when she pleads with Shylock for mercy. Shylock has the upper hand because he is entitled to a pound of flesh and wants that one pound to be another man’s heart, thereby causing death to the other man. She is very convincing to me when she argues that "mercy seasons justice" and that it is "twice blessed" because it does some good for the one who is merciful and also for the ones who benefit from the mercy. Those in positions of power, particularly politicians, bosses, teachers and the like, need to study The Merchant of Venice and the famous mercy speech and take from it what they can.
I have also learned from Iago in Othello and Lady Macbeth that it is not always in my best interest to listen to those around me. Sometimes my own instincts are better than the advice offered to me by people who have their own personal agendas.
It is not just Shakespeare’s plays that are valuable old literature, to be sure. Much of that old poetry besides Wordsworth is priceless, too. When I was a reporter at The Detroit News for 11 years (1984-1995), I had a very messy desk, so messy that it was cited as a fire hazard at one point because I had lots of newspapers around. But I justified the disarray by posting a copy of my favorite Robert Herrick poem on the wall above my desk. Perhaps you, too, have read "Delight in Disorder" and related to the speaker’s point that he is more bewitched by imperfections in women than by perfections. I think he would have really liked me.
There is so much more I could say about how reading Shakespeare and Chaucer and Wordsworth and other wonderfully dusty literature has shaped and enhanced my life. I could blather on about how I have tried to live my life by the message in the 1807 poem "The World is Too Much With Us" by Wordsworth. I could recount how humorous it was to watch episodes of The Little Rascals on TV and find mirth in their literary allusions to Shakespeare and to take delight in hearing my own seven-year-old son dramatize "To be or not to be" without his having read Hamlet yet. I could tell you about how I was recently inspired by Marlowe’s 400-year-old poem "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" and read it aloud to my husband, Joseph, at breakfast.
Let it suffice to say that we can not fully appreciate
the times in which we live until we understand that we humans face the
same plights and issues that other humans faced hundreds of years ago.
We can get that understanding by reading quality literary works like Hamlet
and The Canterbury Tales. No education is really complete without
having read at least these two works, preferably with the guidance of a
seasoned teacher like Professor Garbáty, whose love of the literature
inspires students to continue reading long after the essay is due.
copyright ©2000 by Diane Hofsess
Diane Hofsess is best-known for her stint as a
Detroit News writer from 1984 to 1995. She was once dubbed
"The Meanest Woman in Detroit" in a 1986 cover story by Detroit Monthly
magazine. For The Detroit News, she penned the infamous "Yours Truly"
column about local and national celebrities, wrote the "Grape Expectations"
wine column, and produced feature stories about fashion and food. In the
1980's she was ranked among the 50 most powerful women in Detroit, also
by Detroit Monthly magazine. She walked out of The Detroit News
during the newspaper strike of 1995 and never returned. Nowadays, she is
a busy mother of two, a free-lance writer, and the advisor of the student
newspaper at Southfield High School, in Southfield, Mich. She has a master's
degree in journalism and a bachelor's degree in English from The University
of Michigan. But her greatest accomplishment to date is raising two happy
sons (who do not think she is so mean) - Alex, age 10, and Preston, age
8. She parks her pen in Farmington Hills, Mich., with husband Joseph Giacomin,
her sons, and their zaftig mouse catcher, Cappuccino.