I was grimly amused and somewhat irritated by the following extract from an article on Shakespeare on the PennState website:

“When American anthropologist Laura Bohannon lived among the Nigerian Tiv tribe in the 1950s, she brought along a copy of Hamlet. Sitting around a fire, she attempted to tell the tribal elders the tale, believing its archetypes and plot would hold together across cultures. As she recounts in her well-known 1961 essay “Shakespeare in the Bush http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/editors_pick/1966_08-09_pick.html” the linguistic and cultural lenses through which the Tiv interpreted Shakespeare’s tragedy brought a completely new meaning to the story. (Hint: Claudius acted honorably while Hamlet’s was rude and bewitched into madness.) Bohannon’s explanations left the tribe members puzzling over her blindness to the obvious truths in her own people’s legend.”

The irritating dimension of this otherwise amusing story does not reside in the inability of the African tribesmen to understand the deeply Christian morality of the Bard’s finest play, it resides in the inability of modern academics to understand the misunderstanding. The defence of the Niv tribesmen of a usurping monarch who murders his brother in cold blood in order to marry his brother’s wife is curious, but it’s not as curious as the conclusion of the academics that this patently absurd misreading of the play constitutes the bringing of “a completely new meaning to the story”. The trouble with modern academics is that they no longer know the meaning of “meaning”, which is hardly surprising considering that most of them espouse the deconstructionist belief that there’s no such thing as meaning, that meaning is itself only a misunderstanding. Such academics are devoid of any real connection with reality and are therefore incapable of reading anything objectively, least of all the complex and profoundly Christian philosophy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 

Here is what I think really happened in the Nigerian bush. The tribesmen, having never read Shakespeare before, were offered a garbled and incoherent interpretation of the play by a (post)modern academic. Having not been presented with the real meaning of the play, and having been confused by the meaningless sophistry of their tutor’s retelling of the play’s plot, the tribesmen came to their own conclusions, rooted in their own cultural prejudices and in their complete ignorance of Shakespeare. Having been taught badly, they badly missed the mark. Instead of being corrected for their misreading, the (post)modern academic praises them for the “completely new meaning” that they have brought to Shakespeare’s play in which murder and adultery are apparently praised.

I wonder whether (post)modern academics at PennState and other secular institutions in the thrall of secular fundamentalism practise what they preach. I wonder whether they praise all their Freshmen for the “completely new meaning” that they bring to Hamlet when they write incoherent papers rooted in a woeful misunderstanding of the play. One would presume that such a singular view of literary perception would necessitate a universal “A” grade to all students who bring “completely new meaning” to the play. 

Unfortunately for my own students, I require that they show that they can read a work objectively, shunning relativism in the pursuit of seeing the plays as Shakespeare saw them. Seeing through the eyes of the author will always be more rewarding than seeing it through the eyes of unschooled Freshmen, tribesmen, queer theorists, deconstrucitonists and others who value the “completely new meaning” over the real meaning.