Shakespeare and Morality

JONATHAN BURTON: The McGuffey Readers were not the kinds of works that we would wish to use in education today. In fact, they are characterized by rote mastery of the rules of spelling, grammar, and pronunciation, along with memorizing, reciting, and writing out passages of text in long hand. They work in many ways through indoctrination and students come away with a body of knowledge through a rather brain-numbing routine.

Now what’s of interest here is to think about, well, what exactly is that body of knowledge that they come away with? What do they get out of looking at these tiny snippets from larger literary works? If you look across the board at the passages that are included in the McGuffey Reader, you’ll see that there are certain middle-class values that are being emphasized over and over again, and this is particularly visible in their treatment of men and women.

There are sections on courage and true manliness from which students were taught that masculinity meant responsibility and duty above all. There are also sections on house-cleaning, and the greedy girl, and clearly through these sections, a very separate set of domestic rules were being spelled out for young girls to follow. These might culminate in passages like “My Mother’s Bible,” or “Rock Me to Sleep,“ which of course were sentimentalizing maternal care.

The 1857 has passages such as “The Folly of Intoxication,” which is a very short passage from Othello where Cassio complains about how he has sullied his reputation because of drink. And of course the audience to the play, who has the entire scene in context, will know that it really has nothing to do with his intoxication. He’s been duped by Iago. But the way in which the McGuffey works, is that it extracts this tiny passage, and we have no context, and instead it’s going to teach us about the dangers of excessive drink.