ENG 336 Shakespeare through 1600 with Professor Joesph Porter

I shuffle through the crowded chairs, making my way to my usual spot at the back of the classroom. Absentmindedly thumbing through my book, the words of arguably the greatest writer in English history moving beneath my fingers a dozen pages at a time, I wait for class to begin. 

Prof. Porter sits on the table at the head of the room, his suit and tie juxtaposed with the casual way in which he looks over his class.

He begins his lecture by passing around the latest copy of The New Yorker, bruised, battered, and flipped to a specific article: “Shakespeare’s Cure for Xenophobia,” gloss-printed proof that Shakespeare’s work matters, even 400 years later. 

We spend most of our days in Shakespeare Through 1600 discussing the usual suspects of an English class – character, theme, symbolism and imagery and language, all of it colored with Prof. Porter’s idiosyncratic method of interpretation. But it’s moments like this one, holding a wrinkled copy of America’s premier literary magazine, that remind me why exactly I’ve chosen to study English.

The New Yorker article I’m holding takes on the all too relevant issue of prejudice and xenophobia through the lens of The Merchant of Venice, our designated play for the week. The Jewish character Shylock, in one of his most famous speeches, exclaims “Hath a Jew not eyes?... if you prick us do we not bleed?” Shylock both torments and ultimately is tormented by the Christians that surround him, and examining the complicated relationship between the outsider and the majority group in The Merchant of Venice allows us to in turn look at ourselves and our own modern society.

By the time class ends and the curtain closes on Prof. Porter’s lecture, I’m mostly thinking about lunch. But beneath the thoughts of food I’m reminded that English is not just fiction. It’s real and not real, and it does matter, because it provides us with a context through which we can understand the world we inhabit.