The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [38]
When I began teaching a lecture course on Shakespeare many years ago, I initially thought of the memorization requirement as an old-fashioned practice that was basically a waste of time. How wrong I was. After a year or two, wanting my students to get closer to the text and to feel ownership of it, I restored the requirement that each student memorize twenty consecutive lines of text—any twenty but preferably a single speech—and perform it in the section, or small-group, part of the course. If a student were really reluctant, he or she could recite the lines in office hours, but once it became normalized, students were usually agreeable to, and often eager for, the chance to perform in front of their classmates. Some of the performances were simply stunning and taught me things I had not known about the plays. I remember with particular pleasure a young man who performed Cassius’s speech about Brutus (“Why man, he doth bestride the earth / Like a Colossus”) with an unbelievably strong outburst of bitter feeling toward the end, when Cassius reports having once rescued “the tired Caesar” from drowning. “And this man / Is now become a god.” I never read these lines now without hearing that student’s voice behind them, and he was only one of hundreds who did this exercise every year. I tell my students that they will always remember the lines they have memorized—that at their twenty-fifth class reunions, long after they have forgotten what I said about the plays in lecture, they would still be able to call up “their” Shakespeare speech from deep memory and recite it. I’ve asked some reunion classes about this, and they’ve said it is true. The lines had become their lines. They owned a piece of Shakespeare.
Memorization is often conflated with rote learning, in which nothing is really learned but only repeated. Lately, in the press, this kind of memorization has been associated with indoctrination or even with terrorist ideology, as in the account of madrassas (Islamic religious schools) that teach their students to memorize passages from the Koran. Of course, the United States has some texts that are routinely memorized as well, like the Pledge of Allegiance, the Gettysburg Address, and “America the Beautiful.” Rarely do we subject any of these to textual analysis—as we would certainly do with poetry or other memorized passages in a literature class—and it might make for some very lively discussions to compare the merits, for example, of “purple mountain majesties” (which is what Katharine Lee Bates wrote in 1895) to “purple mountain’s majesty,” which is what many people sing.
The tenor of the Pledge of Allegiance as a recitation piece, and a political document and a loyalty oath, was changed when the phrase “under God” was inserted in 1954. From a poetic point of view, the rhythm was altered, as the line comes to a thudding halt: “One nation [heavy pause], under God [heavy pause], indivisible [heavy pause], with liberty and justice for all.” Equally significant and equally forgotten are (1) the fact that the pledge was originally written by a Baptist minister and Christian socialist and was distributed as part of a marketing ploy for a popular children’s magazine, The Youth’s Companion, in connection with the sale of flags in the public schools; and (2) the fact that from 1892 to 1942 the recitation of the pledge was accompanied by a stiff salute, the arm outstretched and the palm upward, that looked disconcertingly like the Nazi salute and was therefore changed, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to the now familiar hand over the heart.
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