In the 400th year since William Shakespeare’s death, there is still reluctance among many secondary school students to accept Shakespeare as an author who speaks to them and their dilemmas. In part this derives from the misguided notion that Shakespeare’s language is historically remote, too difficult, even inaccessible. But Shakespeare is not difficult if we understand his work as he intended it - as theater, not narrative. If we listen to Shakespeare rather than reading him, if we attend to the human scenarios he presents rather the hunting for meaning, theses, and essay topics, if we recognize the everydayness rather than pursuing the remote, then Shakespeare is as contemporary in 2016 as he was in 1616.

Stephen Brown has been a 3M National Teaching Fellow and an Honorary Fellow of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education since 1997. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and has been a visiting professor at the Centre for the History of the Book and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. In 2013, he was Ormiston Roy Fellow in Scottish Studies at the University of South Carolina. He has published widely in the field of print culture and literacy.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx.