Ignorance of the Bard painful

Gripping the side of my desk, I cringed and tried to refrain from turning around in my seat to snap at the guy seated in the back corner who had asked the question.

How can you not know, my mind urged me to question. Didn’t they teach you that in high school?

Of course I didn’t shout, but I did think the words several times. Indeed, the question had almost caused a physical pain when I heard it. I just could not believe that right there, in my theatre arts survey, someone had uttered it so unabashedly:

“Didn’t a Greek write Othello?”

Perdition my soul! No, a Greek didn’t write it; William Shakespeare, poet magnificent, penned The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice.

You must keep in mind that I am an apostle of Shakespeare; I have read and studied his works, committed monologues to memory and even made my pilgrimage to London’s Globe Theatre and Stratford-upon-Avon. To this writer and his works I commit my utmost loyalty and respect. Admittedly, I probably am more aware of him than non-devotees — I do not expect the whole world to share in my passion — but don’t they teach basic Shakespeare in high school? Please do not tell me that irrational feminists have successfully removed him from curriculums on the basis of his dead-white-male status. To do so could be likened to another fall of man.

Feminists have, for some time, railed against the number of dead-white-males that receive attention within school curriculum, claiming that the study of Shakespeare and his contemporaries prevents students from learning about the important female writers. While I agree women writers are important, they do not merit the black-balling of Shakespeare. Shakespearean studies are indispensable to the understanding of great literature, and help to spark interest in literature for some students.

This is, perhaps, my manifesto on the bard’s behalf.

I believe that students should not simply overlook him on account of the frequent mention of his name in literature classes, and should, instead, expand their knowledge of him beyond what is regularly mentioned. Shakespeare, after all, wrote much more than the over-commercialized Romeo and Juliet.

His works are timeless miracles of language, paintings of sound and images of emotion. His works have inspired countless works of art and theater productions. The characters and plays he breathed to life explore every possible aspect of human nature and existence; the occurrences in the plays transcend the lines of the ages, and they provide insight during the search for self-understanding.

Stereotypes and misconceptions prevent many people from attempting to read Shakespeare on a regular basis. Despite these things, all it takes is one play to get a person addicted; I can attest to this. My sophomore year of high school I read Macbeth and, thus, began my faithful following; to this day I possess a pocket version of the play that I carry with me in my purse.

Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies may not have appeal at first, but at least try them out; you may be a Shakespeare apostle in the waiting! But if they fail to excite after a trial, at least know enough about him to respect his greatness and attribute his own plays to his name.

It sounds foolish when you are out in the real world at a dinner party or other social event and you can’t separate the Greeks from the English. It is so necessary to make the distinction, because not only do the two possess completely different styles of theater, but Shakespeare is also too important to be confused with other writers.

Please make the distinction, because I may not be able to control myself the next time I hear someone seriously ask “if a Greek wrote that.”

Miranda Nesler is a freshman English major from Houston.
She can be reached at (m.g.nesler@student-.tcu.edu).

He simply calls himself a teacher and a witness, but Elie Wiesel has been much more than that in his life.
At a young age, Wiesel was separated from his mother and younger sister at a Polish concentration camp. Both were later killed. He has written more than 40 books, most dealing with the horrors of the Holocaust, garnered the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Now, Wiesel will speak at 8 p.m. today in Daniel-Meyer Coliseum on “The Seduction and Dangers of Fanaticism.”

TCU doesn’t have many opportunities to host Nobel Peace Laureates, yet almost all Wednesday night classes are meeting. The lecture is free to all TCU students and Daniel-Meyer Coliseum can accommodate about 4,000 people, yet only 2,000 to 3,000 people are expected to attend, said Diane Cooper, associate vice president for advancement for the Brite Divinity School.

Wiesel asks people to be willing to understand the plight of others.

“My work is to write; your work is to interpret,” he said.

We wonder how Wiesel will interpret our university should he speak to a host of empty seats.

Wiesel has often said the greatest threat to the world is indifference.

“Indifference means a kind of death,” he said. “A death of the heart, of the mind and of the soul.”

The best way to fight indifference is to become sensitive to others, Wiesel said.

We challenge the people in the TCU community to be responsive and take the chance to learn from a man that has experienced the inhumanity of man.

The Democratic Party has historically favored a liberal perspective of supporting First Amendment rights. However, these views have been thrown out the window in its current presidential campaign.

Recently, Vice President Al Gore has taken the issue of censorship to the forefront in Hollywood. Although he has traditionally had a rocky relationship with the entertainment industry, he has brought the issue out as his trump card, once again, solely to win over the vote of young families.

After a Federal Trade Commission report came out last week stating that Hollywood markets violence and sex to children under the age of 17, Gore quickly jumped to the attack. Although Gore refuses to call it censorship, he says he is going to provide the FTC with new enforcement powers and the ability to prosecute companies if they don’t change their selling practices.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it considered censorship when a company is prosecuted and has its products taken off the market as a result? Gore has always wasted the public’s time on condemning Hollywood’s immoral fabric, for example, when he had a long-running obsession with the V-Chip, but now he is doing it just to win votes.

My favorite instance of Gore’s ludicrous crusade is when he attacked various entertainment moguls for showing movie stars smoking in their films, which he claimed advertised cigarettes to children. Since when does a character in a movie smoking serve as an advertisement to our nation’s youth? People smoke in reality, so it makes sense that films reflect that in an attempt to capture realism. Do you lecture random smokers on the street because they are influencing kids to smoke? I would at least hope not.

The most upsetting aspect of this mess is Gore’s blatant hypocrisy. Just this election cycle, the entertainment industry donated over $22 million to Gore’s campaign. Also, he was criticized for attending a party at the apartment of Miramax Films chairman Harvey Weinstein, whose company has produced the NC-17-rated “Kids” (ironically titled considering Gore’s criticism, isn’t it?) and several violent Quentin Tarantino films. Coincidentally, Gore didn’t make much mention of his Hollywood criticisms at the party as he raised $6.5 million that evening.

Meanwhile, Republican Party candidate George W. Bush has remained relatively quiet on the subject. However, when questioned on the issue, he proposed measures similar to Gore’s, except to a lesser extreme. One of the things I liked about Bush early in the campaign was his strong platform on personal responsibility. However, now he is abandoning that, at least regarding Hollywood, in order to avoid plummeting further in the polls and to make a lazy appeal for the young families that Gore is attempting to reach out to. This was the perfect opportunity for him to follow his original stance and make a plea to the parents to keep their children from going to see the violence and sex that Hollywood propagates.

It is utterly ridiculous for people to continually blame film and television for corrupting America’s youth. Unfortunately, we live in a society that yearns to have a scapegoat for anything that goes wrong, just so we can sleep comfortably at night. More unfortunate is the fact that people, especially politicians, have a tendency to pin the blame on Hollywood when they can’t find anyone or anything else to accuse.

At least we’ve moved past the times when we tried to hang people for the suspicion of wrongdoing anymore. Too bad this is only true in a literal sense.

Jordan Blum is a sophomore broadcast journalism major from New Orleans, LA.
He can be reached at (j.d.blum@student.tcu.edu).