When Shakespeare wrote of “The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces” dissolving and leaving “not a rack behind,” I wonder if he was speaking prophetically about the fate of his plays and the inherited canon of English literature in the modern age.
One of the first acts of the new Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has been to establish a new Curriculum and Assessment Review, which promises, in parlance less than Shakespearean, to “ensure that the curriculum appropriately balances ambition, excellence, relevance, flexibility and inclusivity for all children and young people.”
The Review’s membership is rather light on subject specialists who could give us chapter and verse on the history of the English novel or the grand tradition of epic, but it is well-endowed with academics steeped in technical theories of education, assessment, and indeed diversity. One member recently declared the 2024 summer riots sprang from a “broken education system” that deemed “anti-racist education inappropriate”, and “from people questioning ‘Why we make everything about race’ instead of questioning people’s prejudice.”
One dares not expect the review to be anything but an exercise to weaken the curriculum’s current emphasis on the possession of knowledge, to reduce its content, and to give free rein to the vogue of “decolonisation”. In terms of the English syllabus at GCSE and A-level, we are likely to see the requirement to read Shakespeare plays and pre-1914 texts watered down, and a far greater presence of contemporary non-white authors. Indeed, the Review states as one of its aims “a curriculum that reflects the issues and diversities of our society, ensuring all children and young people are represented.”
This month, an open letter organised by Penguin Random House and signed by nearly 200 teachers, librarians, publishers and authors (including Stephen Fry, Ruth Padel and Sathnam Sanghera, who all richly benefitted from Oxbridge educations grounded in the historical literary canon) called on the Review to hasten this work of increasing the “diversity” of the curriculum. The letter complained that only 1 in 3 of children aged between 8 and 18 said that they enjoyed reading in their spare time, and that whilst 37 per cent of England’s schoolchildren “identifying as Black, Asian or minority ethnic, 98.5 per cent of English Literature GCSE students do not study a text by a writer of colour.”
The letter cited recent research conducted by The Runnymede Trust together with Pearson, the University of Oxford and Penguin Random House which found that “studying texts by writers of colour at GCSE English Literature can increase students’ empathy, understanding of others, engagement in class, and enjoyment of reading.” Whilst, they concede, “the classics will always have a vital role in the curriculum, teaching a more representative range of literature has the powerful ability to offer windows into other perspectives and ensure all students feel included and visible in the books they read.” Without such a change that would allow “young people to develop into understanding, tolerant and compassionate citizens”, we might well face more riots like the summer.
One can easily spot conspicuous flaws with the letter and the underlying research. They give no thought to the impact that the rise in phones and social media might have on reading for pleasure. Their greatest interest in the traditional canon, large parts of which are “problematic,” is apparently as a tool for critiquing the British Empire and ideas of race. They otherwise imply it is somehow incapable of offering windows to other perspectives or generating enjoyment, rather than considering whether there is a problem with the way it is taught. They take it as an article of faith that one needs to see a reflection of one’s own personal characteristics, particularly racial, to engage with a text — on which basis I might be expected to prefer the theological works of the Ayatollah Khomeini to the novels of P.G. Wodehouse (which I don’t).
But the greatest problem is that the authors of the letter and research show themselves to be remarkably unversed in the diversity of the traditional English canon as it stands. Indeed, if they really want to diversify the canon, the best way to do so is to get deeper into it, and go more traditional.
One of the wellsprings of the English canon is, of course, classical literature. Where does this start? With Homer, who, if he existed, was a blind poet born on the shores of Asia Minor. What of his works? The Iliad: battles between Mediterranean warlords and an Asiatic king with many children, not to mention the unspeakably intense love between two male warriors, Achilles and Patroclus, and the general collapse of an old self-confident social order based on ideals of heroism. Or the Odyssey: a single child hunting desperately for his father as he sails across the furthest reaches of the known world, a penniless refugee from the Trojan War, mixed up with beggars, social outcasts, and horrific domestic violence. Isn’t this diverse enough?
The other fount of the English canon, scarcely studied in schools nowadays, is the Bible
Let’s not forget the Romans. Virgil’s Aeneid again starts with despairing refugees shipwrecked by a storm on the coast of north Africa, begging Dido, Queen of Carthage (herself a refugee from Tyre in modern-day Lebanon) for help, before they continue to hunt on rickety vessels for their promised homeland in the west (where they settle following a brutal conflict, having promised to accept the local customs and language of Italy). If one wanted something to appeal to the 35,000 who crossed the English Channel on small boats this year, then surely this would be it.
What of philosophy and knowledge of the gods? Aristotle points to the rise of philosophical thinking in the city of Miletus in Asia Minor. Plato cheerfully confesses the primacy of the Egyptians. In the Timaeus, he recounts the story of the Athenian lawgiver Solon being told by an Egyptian priest that “you Greeks are always children” who possess “not a single belief that is ancient and derived from old tradition, nor yet one science that is hoary with age.” Tragedy? Dionysus, the very god of the genre, appearing in Euripides’ Bacchae, revels in his Eastern connections, running though “the wealthy lands of the Lydians and Phrygians, the sun-parched plains of the Persians … the Bactrian walls [in Afghanistan] … the wintry land of the Medes, and blessed Arabia, and all of Asia … ”
The other fount of the English canon, scarcely studied in schools nowadays, is the Bible. In it, the first humans dwell apparently somewhere within the bounds of modern-day Iraq. Some of the first places to be mentioned are Assyria and Ethiopia. Abraham and the patriarchs circulate between the coast of the Persian Gulf, modern-day Syria, and Egypt. Greatly revered are the Queen of Sheba (probably in modern-day Yemen) who is also prominent in Ethiopian and Islamic folklore, and Cyrus, King of Persia, hailed as the only non-Jewish Messiah (anointed one) for his liberation of the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity. The fact that the white British population are conspicuously under-represented in all of this did not prevent them from taking the Old Testament to heart for generations.
The New Testament similarly gets about. Not only did St Paul find himself involved with towns across Syria and Asia Minor, but the very origin of the Church itself, the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost in Acts 2, was a great festival of diversity. There, the crowd was astonished to hear the Apostles speaking to them in their own languages: “Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.” English is not mentioned, but this was no impediment to the English church celebrating this event with the Feast of Whitsun.
These overseas springs liberally water the roots of the English canon. Asia and the East, especially in the guise of Troy, run to its origins. Chroniclers from the Dark Ages to Tudor times insist that the founder of Britain was Brutus, another refugee descended from Trojan fugitives. Chaucer, and then Shakespeare, both write of the tragic love affair of the city’s prince Troilus and Cressida. Throughout Shakespeare, one can hardly claim that the characters from beyond the bounds of Europe or Christendom are presented in a way that doesn’t offer “perspectives” or the possibility of “empathy.” “Mislike me not for my complexion” the Prince of Morocco entreats Portia in the Merchant of Venice, where Shylock similarly asks “Hath not a Jew eyes? [ … ] If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?” Othello can relate the “most disastrous chances” of his heroic life story, sold into slavery and redeemed, before becoming the commander of the Venetian armies, respectfully addressed by its Duke as “Valiant”. And Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, is a woman of “infinite variety” who can “make defect perfection.”
It is a marvellous thing for a school library to bloom with new books by recent authors of every ethnicity and background. Let the shelves heave with as many different new titles as possible from the printing presses of Penguin and Pearson, to entertain and inform students in their spare hours about the current and evanescent moment. Yet, when it comes to the classroom and, in the words of King Alfred, one of the earliest English educationalists to set a curriculum, “Books most needful for all men to know,” students should be set to read the best texts that give them a long perspective both of the history of this country and its literature, as well as human nature. As our traditional canon is full of material which not only does this, but is replete with diversity, from the Parthians and Medes to the parts of Libya around Cyrene, perhaps more of it, better and more confidently taught, is what we need.
