Finessing Religious Objections to the Plays

JONATHAN BURTON: The inclusion of Shakespeare in the McGuffey Readers was in many ways at odds with some of the main streams of American thought, the continuing stream of Puritan culture and its anti-theatrical attitudes in the United States. Now the question over how the McGuffey Readers could get away with including Shakespeare in that context perhaps is best answered by looking at how Shakespeare is presented in those texts, which is to say the passages from the play don't always appear to be coming from plays.

We don't have the speech prefaces, for example, that you see in a play. So, for example, a speech that's given by Portia in The Merchant of Venice—we'll be accustomed to seeing the name Portia, a colon, and then the beginning of the speech. But instead, in the McGuffey Readers, we often just get the passage. So the sense, the fact that it comes from a play is being masked in several ways, not the least of which is the fact that Shakespeare's name and the title of the play is often left out.