The Zeitgeist of Correctness and Inhibition

North Plainfield High School teacher Kristyn Rosen shares her reasons for wanting to move away from teaching Shakespeare's "safe" plays and towards plays that ask difficult questions, like 'The Merchant of Venice' and 'Othello.'

Baltimore teacher Amber Phelps describes how she would use Shakespeare's 'The Merchant of Venice' in an American Literature unit.

You can argue that these are just video clips by the Shakespeare Folger Library, and we ought not be surprised that these two teachers say very little about why they'd like to teach the more difficult plays.  But perhaps ironically, they end up saying a lot about entrenched issues that still plague American culture.  That in its Zeitgeist of hypersensitivity (i.e., political correctness [PC]) this culture inhibits even our teachers from raising those issues openly and giving them the latitude to teach our children what they need to learn, in order to help resolve these very issues.

Phelps speaks pedantically of "people of non-normative genders, races and classes," showing that we're good at sidling into robotic phrases as a way to safeguard ourselves from the PC police.  

'The Merchant of Venice' is about the titular merchant Shylock, who as a Jew is the subject of some derision in the play.  Maybe what Phelps and Rosen mean is, they'd like at least to raise the issue of anti-semitism in the classroom, plus weigh a host of legal and moral slants that define the character of Shylock.  For example, he has his chance to exact revenge on others concerning these extraordinarily tough issues, after a business transaction went awry:

To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.

Years ago I watched 'The Merchant of Venice' at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, in which the director, in contrast to the clips above, boldly laid the issues out, shook the table, and demand we make sense of it all.  For one, Shylock was played by an African-American actor.  For another, Portia was played by an Asian-American actress.

David Richards, who reviewed this staging in a 1994 article for The New York Times, admired the boldness but was mixed, at best, about its impact on the audience.