Shakespeare in the Early McGuffey Readers

JONATHAN BURTON: The advanced readers that appeared in the nineteenth century—so, for example, with the McGuffey Readers, we're talking about the Fifth and Sixth Readers—were intended for high school and college students, although most students probably didn't get beyond the Third Reader due to the pressure to work on farms and in factories. So, those students who would be getting Shakespeare at the level of the Fifth and Sixth Readers, these were typically students who were at the age of what we would say—we would put these students into middle school or early high school years.

Shakespeare appears first in the McGuffey Reader, the Fourth Reader, of 1837, and this work has just two passages in it. One is a section of King John and it's merely entitled "Prince Arthur" and the name of the play does not even appear. The same can be said of the one excerpt from Julius Caesar that's also included, which is entitled "Antony's Oration over Caesar's Dead Body." Here it's important to note that Shakespeare's name does not appear with these passages, nor does the name of the play.

The two passages in the Fourth Reader of 1837 appeal to the virtue of mercy, both of them. In fact, what you find in Antony's oration over Caesar's dead body is an appeal to mercy that's then really turned into a call to arms. So it's a very interesting piece rhetorically, and gets at also some of what the McGuffey Readers are trying to do in terms of morality, which is to say they're at once interested in inculcating certain values—here, mercy is, of course, a central Christian value. On the other hand, by using Shakespeare's works, works that were often considered by religious figures in America to be irreligious, they seem to be sort of moving in opposite directions.