Shakespeare & The Courage To Not Know

An Invitation To Reimagine The Purpose For Teaching The Classics

Photo by Fabio Hofnik - The Player King, a 2022 SIR production - performed by Rodrigo Beilfuss, Directed by Ron Pederson, Designed by Joseph Abetria

I recently delivered the talk/lecture below as part of the MATE (Manitoba Association of Teachers of English) PD Day Conference, on October 23rd, 2026 - A World of Change: Strategies for the ELA Classroom.

Many participants have asked me for a transcript of my notes and thoughts. So I've decided to compile it all into the blog post below. I hope you enjoy it, and that it may prove useful on your journey. - Rodrigo B.

PART ONE: THE BOY WHO DIDN’T SPEAK ENGLISH

First of all, thank you for inviting me to spend some time with you today. I would also like to acknowledge the wonderful irony of doing this talk via Zoom, given that so much of what I'm about to say focuses on the need for embodied experiences, and the value of proper intimacy. Nevertheless, I will also touch on contradictions, so this is absolutely perfect!

I want to begin with a story.

When I was eighteen years old, I arrived in Winnipeg from Brazil as a high school exchange student.

I was a boy. I was alone in a new country. And I barely spoke English.

Now, I had studied English in Brazil, of course. But there is a rather significant difference between studying a language in a classroom and suddenly having to conduct your entire life in that language.

Everything was unfamiliar. Everything required translation. Every conversation was an exercise in concentration, in decoding, in trying desperately to keep up.

And then I found myself in Mr. McLeod’s English class at st james collegiate.

And we were studying Hamlet. Just a few weeks after I got off the plane.

Now, you can imagine.

Here I was, a Brazilian teenager struggling to understand what people were saying to me at the grocery store, and suddenly I was expected to understand William Shakespeare.

It was terrifying.

But something extraordinary happened in that classroom.

I realized that I wasn’t the only one who was confused.

Suddenly, everybody was confused by the English language.

All these Canadian students, who had been speaking English their entire lives, were staring at the same pages, scratching their heads, trying to understand what on earth this man was talking about.

And suddenly, something shifted.

For the first time since arriving in Canada, I didn’t feel particularly disadvantaged by my relationship with the English language.

We were all in the same boat.

We were all trying to crack this extraordinary code.

And I remember feeling this tremendous impulse to simply speak the words.

Even when I didn’t understand them. Especially when I didn’t understand them.

I wanted to put them in my mouth. To chew on them. To taste them. To hear what they sounded like coming out of me.

There was something delicious about the language.

Something muscular. Something mysterious.

And I discovered that I didn’t necessarily have to understand what I was saying in order to begin enjoying the experience of saying it.

That was a revelation.

Because what Mr. McLeod’s classroom offered me (because of what he allowed me to play with) - whether he knew it or not - was permission not to know.

Permission to be confused; without shame.

Permission to encounter something difficult and not immediately tame to understand it.

Permission to play.

And that permission changed my life.

It opened up the English language to me in a way that no vocabulary test, no grammar exercise, no conventional language lesson ever had.

It invited me into a relationship with language that was physical, imaginative, emotional, and profoundly personal.

Eventually, of course, it led me to the theatre.

And here I am, all these years later, making a living speaking words that other people have written. And the name 'Shakespeare' has been on my paycheque since 2014, between working at Stratford and now leading SIR.

If Bill was told 4 centuries ago that a Brazilian would be paying his bills on his money in Winnipeg, he would have gone What?!

Which, when you think about it, is a rather absurd way to make a living.

But it’s a beautiful one.

And I sometimes wonder what would have happened if, instead of being invited to explore Shakespeare, I had simply been told that the text was too difficult for me. That I had to LEARN the words. That I had to speak in a certain way. In a certain accent. Write a massive essay about it. Etc. That I wasn’t ready. That we should find something easier, something more accessible, something I could understand immediately.

I wonder what would have been lost.

Not simply in terms of my education. But in terms of my life.

And so I want to begin today with a proposition. A slight provocation.

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give a student is not the confidence of knowing, but the courage of not knowing.

Because I think we’re living in a world that is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with not knowing; with uncertainties.

And I think Shakespeare has something rather urgent to offer us.

PART TWO: THE TYRANNY OF EFFICIENCY

We are obsessed with efficiency. We optimize everything.

We optimize our schedules. Our productivity. Our communication. Our entertainment. Our relationships. Our sleep. We optimize our sleep. There is an app for everything.

We have technology that anticipates what we want before we even know we want it.

We have algorithms that curate our cultural experiences for us.

We have devices that promise to eliminate inconvenience, friction, waiting, and uncertainty.

And increasingly, I fear, we are applying the same logic to education.

How can we make learning faster?

How can we make it easier?

How can we deliver information more efficiently?

How can we remove the obstacles that stand between the student and the desired outcome?

Now, of course, accessibility matters enormously. And I’m not suggesting that difficulty is inherently virtuous, or that we should make learning unnecessarily complicated.

But I do wonder whether, in our pursuit of efficiency, we risk eliminating something essential.

Because what if the friction is where the learning happens?

What if the difficulty isn’t an obstacle to the educational experience?

What if the difficulty is part of the experience itself?

I’ll give you a rather embarrassing personal example.

Earlier this week, I decided to write a letter to a friend. An actual letter. With a pen. On paper.

Remember those?

And I thought it would be lovely. I imagined myself sitting quietly here at my desk, composing my thoughts, enjoying the intimacy of handwriting. Well.

I couldn’t do it.

I genuinely couldn’t do it.

My mind was moving so much faster than my hand could keep up with.

I was rushing. I was scribbling. My handwriting was becoming increasingly illegible. It was a mess.

I couldn’t tolerate the pace of the exercise.

Eventually, I gave up and typed the letter, and then copied it by hand - with great struggle...

And I found that surprisingly heartbreaking.

Because I realized that something had changed in me.

I have become so accustomed to the speed of digital communication that the simple act of slowing my thoughts to the pace of my hand had become deeply uncomfortable.

And I began thinking about what that meant.

Not simply for handwriting, which is obviously not the central crisis of our civilization.

But for the experience of thinking itself.

What happens when we become so accustomed to speed that slowness feels intolerable?

What happens when we become so accustomed to immediate comprehension that confusion feels like failure?

What happens when every question seems to demand an immediate answer?

Our technologies don’t simply influence what we consume. They influence the habits through which we consume it.

And I worry that some of those habits are becoming incompatible with the sustained attention required for complex thought.

Now, I’m not a neuroscientist. I don’t want to pretend that I can diagnose an entire generation’s brain.

But I can speak to my own experience. And I suspect many of us recognize something similar.

We are losing patience with the slow unfolding of things.

And that brings me back to Shakespeare.

Because Shakespeare is gloriously inefficient.

He refuses to deliver everything immediately.

He asks us to stop.

To listen.

To return to a sentence.

To speak it again. And again. And again. And again.

To toss a sentence about like you're throwing laundry into a washing machine, and watch it spin and spin and spin, trying to catch the light of meaning; changing rhythms as it goes round and round...

To discover that a word we thought we understood might mean something else entirely.

To sit with an image that doesn’t immediately reveal itself.

He asks us to pay attention. To sit in confusion.

And in a culture that is increasingly organized around the elimination of friction, Shakespeare insists upon it.

I would argue that this is not a reason to remove him from our classrooms.

It may be one of the most compelling reasons to keep him there.

Because reading is hard work.

Thinking is hard work.

Engaging with complex language requires concentration, patience, effort, and sometimes discomfort.

And I think we have to be very careful about confusing discomfort with harm.

They are not the same thing.

Of course we must protect our students from genuine harm. Of course we must create compassionate, supportive learning environments.

But we must also create environments where students feel safe enough to struggle. And we can help, and hold them through that struggle.

Where they understand that confusion is not evidence of stupidity.

That frustration is not evidence of failure.

That the inability to understand something immediately does not mean they are incapable of understanding it eventually.

And perhaps most importantly, that understanding isn’t always the destination.

Sometimes the exploration itself is the point. To rest things in the process stage, instead of striving for a product...

For instance. I love rehearsing a play far more than actually doing it night after night. I love process. Investigation. Invitations. Conversations. Confessions.

Making a product is far less interesting...

PART THREE: SHAKESPEARE ENTERS THE BODY

Now, here’s where I think we sometimes get Shakespeare wrong.

We begin with the head.

We begin with comprehension.

What does this word mean?

What is happening in this scene?

What is the plot?

What does this character want?

What is the central theme?

And all of those questions are important.

But I wonder whether we’re sometimes beginning at the wrong end of the experience.

Because Shakespeare wasn’t writing novels.

He wasn’t writing academic texts.

He was writing plays.

And plays are meant to be spoken.

He was writing for actors.

For bodies.

For voices.

For breath.

For audiences gathered together in a physical space.

And I think we sometimes forget how fundamentally physical the experience of language can be.

When I encountered Shakespeare at eighteen, I wasn’t initially interested in understanding the philosophical complexities of Hamlet. I couldn't. And I literally could not understand what the words meant. I simply chose to get past all the shame and play with sound.

I was interested in the sounds. In the sonic experience.

O that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew…

I wanted to say the words.

I wanted to experience them in my mouth.

And I think there’s a tremendous opportunity here for educators.

What if we begin with pleasure rather than comprehension?

What if we begin with sound?

With rhythm?

With the music of the language?

What if we invite students to encounter Shakespeare as something to be played with, rather than something to be solved?

Think about iambic pentameter.

Now, the phrase itself sounds rather intimidating, doesn’t it?

Iambic pentameter.

It sounds like something you might need a medical specialist to examine.

But essentially, we’re talking about rhythm.

A pattern of beats.

A pulse.

Five iambic feet, each generally moving from an unstressed syllable to a stressed one.

da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM.

And when I teach this to young actors, I sometimes describe it as the hip-hop of Shakespeare’s time.

Not because Shakespeare was literally writing hip-hop, obviously. But because there is something immediately recognizable about the pleasure of language organized through rhythm.

Rhythm is meaning. And meaning is rhythm. 5 stresses in a 10 syllable line.

Shall I compare the to a summer’s day

Thou art more lovely and more temperate

A musical structure. Through expectation and disruption.

And suddenly the text doesn’t have to be approached as an intimidating intellectual monument.

It can be approached as music.

As play.

As something that lives in the body.

A little experiment

Let’s try something together.

I want everyone to say a line of Shakespeare aloud.

You can do this with me, or privately wherever you are.

It’s from Hamlet:

“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”

Now, forget what it means for a moment.

Forget that this is perhaps the most famous line in the history of English drama.

Forget everything you know about Hamlet.

Just say it.

Now let’s find the pulse underneath it.

To BE, or NOT to BE, that IS the QUES-tion.

You can hear the movement of the verse, even as Shakespeare plays with the pattern.

Notice how there’s something odd about this line. Can you see?

There’s an extra syllable. It ends in an unusually unstressed beat…

Why?

There is no "right" answer; but simply asking your students about why they think that is the very point of the investigation; ask them why they think Shakespeare breaks the form of his rhythm deliberately in the most famous of all lines...

Maybe, through form, Shakespeare is giving us a glimpse into the interior of the character.

Maybe by breaking the verse, he gives us...

...the heartbreak of Hamlet.

He is off the beat.

Form informs content.

Sound informs emotional quality.

Rhythm is meaning. Meaning is rhythm.

Try speaking it while gently tapping the beat on your chest.

Or walking, if you have the space.

Feel where the language wants to move.

Now say it again, but this time as though you’re genuinely asking a question.

Not making a grand philosophical statement.

Now try it as though you’re angry. Or exhausted.

Or amused by the absurdity of having to ask such a question in the first place.

Notice what happens.

The words haven’t changed.

But the experience has.

And perhaps something in the meaning has begun to change too.

Not because we looked up a definition.

But because we allowed the language to move through us.

And this, to me, is one of the great gifts of theatre.

The body can sometimes discover something before the intellect knows how to explain it.

And this is why I think embodiment matters so much in education today.

We live increasingly disembodied lives.

We experience much of our music through recordings and headphones.

We experience storytelling through screens.

We communicate with people who are physically absent.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that. I’m speaking to you through a screen right now!

But there is something distinctive about the experience of making language happen in the physical world.

For Shakespeare’s audiences, music and performance were living events.

Sounds came from people.

From instruments being played in the room.

From actors standing a few feet away.

The audience could feel the energy of a voice travelling through space.

And language wasn’t merely information.

It was an event.

Something that happened between bodies.

I think we can offer our students a little of that experience.

We can invite them to stand up.

To walk the rhythm.

To speak the words.

To discover how breath shapes thought.

How consonants create resistance.

How vowels open up the voice.

How a sentence can begin in one emotional place and arrive somewhere entirely different - through sound.

And suddenly Shakespeare isn’t an examination.

It’s an encounter.

And that encounter might lead to comprehension.

It might lead to curiosity.

It might lead to an entirely unexpected emotional discovery.

But first, we have to give students permission to play.

And, sure: I was a very eager student; not everyone wants to jump and speak.

Then meet them where they are in life: ask them to whisper the words. Whispering is wonderful.

Ask them to whisper them to themselves in private. Ask them to become intimate with the words in that way.

Seek that intimacy.

Language will suddenly feel like a prayer. And prayers come from need. And a need is marked by importance. And in that investigation, their words (Shakespeare's words) will gain importance. And that's acting: making words important!

And this leads me to something else I think is important.

Shakespeare the brand versus Shakespeare the artist

We need to distinguish Shakespeare the artist from Shakespeare the brand.

Because Shakespeare the brand can be an intimidating thing.

Shakespeare the brand is the great cultural monument.

The symbol of English literary superiority.

The name associated with centuries of educational institutions, cultural authority, and, yes, colonial and imperial history.

And for many students, especially students who don’t see themselves reflected in that tradition, Shakespeare can feel like something that belongs to somebody else.

Something they are expected to admire.

Something they’re expected to understand because somebody has told them it’s important.

But Shakespeare the artist?

That’s another matter.

Shakespeare the artist was a working theatre practitioner.

A playwright.

An actor. A dad of three kids. A commuter. A man from the country making a living in the big city.

A man writing for a commercial theatre.

Writing for audiences.

Writing for people who wanted to be entertained, provoked, moved, frightened, seduced, and delighted.

He was writing for the stage, not for the high school examination.

I sometimes imagine what Shakespeare would make of the way we teach his plays today.

I suspect he’d find some of it rather bewildering.

Imagine telling him that, four hundred years later, millions of teenagers would be sitting at desks, silently studying his words and worrying about getting the correct answer on a test.

He’d find that completely insane.

Because these plays were meant to live.

And I think one of our responsibilities as educators and theatre artists is to rescue Shakespeare the artist from Shakespeare the institution.

When we decide to stop teaching him, what we are really doing is saying we don’t want to engage with the institution of Shakespeare. But we can, and we should, engage with the artist.

To return the words to the bodies for which they were written.

To the whisper.

To restore their playfulness.

Their sensuality.

Their danger.

Their extraordinary humanity.

PART FOUR: THE THEATRE OF IMAGINATION

And there’s another remarkable thing about Shakespeare’s theatre.

It’s a theatre that demands the imagination of the audience.

We sometimes call this heard scenery.

The scenery is created through language.

Think about the opening chorus of Henry V.

Shakespeare is asking his audience to imagine an enormous historical world.

Armies.

Kingdoms.

Battlefields.

Horses.

All within the confines of a relatively modest theatrical space.

And the Chorus says:

“Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them.” And he asks the audience: "can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France…?"

I love that line.

Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them.

It’s practically an instruction manual for the entire theatrical experience.

We don’t have the horses.

We’re not going to give you the horses.

We’re going to talk about the horses.

And you are going to see them.

In your mind.

The audience must complete the theatrical event.

The actors offer language.

The audience supplies the world.

And this requires something extraordinary.

It requires the active participation of the imagination.

That's the theatre Shakespeare writes. Nobody does that anymore. They’re all writing for Netflix, and they are writing around words, not through them.

Think about how much of our contemporary entertainment is built around giving us increasingly sophisticated visual representations of everything.

We can create entire universes on screens. In our phones!

We can render creatures, landscapes, armies, explosions, and impossible physical events with astonishing realism.

And that’s wonderful.

I love cinema. It is my favourite of all artforms!

But there’s a fundamental difference between being shown a horse and being invited to imagine one.

When an actor says, “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them,” something has to happen inside the audience.

You have to create the image.

You have to collaborate.

You have to become, in some small way, an artist yourself.

And I think this is tremendously important.

Because imagination isn’t simply a decorative quality.

It isn’t something we use only when we’re making art.

Imagination is central to the way we understand the world.

It’s how we imagine possibilities beyond our immediate circumstances.

It’s how we begin to understand experiences we haven’t personally lived.

It’s how we consider alternative futures.

It’s how we entertain the possibility that the world might be different from the way it currently is.

And surely that is something we want to cultivate in young people.

Not simply the ability to receive information. But the capacity to create meaning.

To imagine. To participate. To see what isn’t immediately visible.

And this is where Shakespeare’s complexity becomes such a gift.

Because the language doesn’t do all the work for us.

It asks us to do some of the work ourselves, within us.

PART FIVE: THE CONTRADICTORY HUMAN BEING

Now I want to talk about something that I think is perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest contribution to our understanding of ourselves.

His fascination with the contradictory human being.

Because human beings are profoundly contradictory creatures.

We love people and hurt them.

We believe in things and act against those beliefs.

We are capable of tremendous kindness and tremendous cruelty.

We are courageous one moment and cowardly the next.

We can be extraordinarily intelligent and spectacularly dumb.

Often within the same afternoon.

And Shakespeare understood this. In fact, he seemed endlessly fascinated by it.

Let’s return to Hamlet.

At one point, Hamlet tells Ophelia:

“You should not have believed me. I loved you not.”

A devastating thing to say. But then, later in the play, at Ophelia’s grave, he declares:

“I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum.”

Well.

Which one is it, Hamlet?

Did you love her or didn’t you?

Were you telling the truth before?

Are you telling the truth now?

Is this grief?

Is this guilt?

Is this genuine love?

Is this a man performing his emotions for the benefit of the people around him?

Perhaps it’s all of those things.

Perhaps some of them.

Perhaps the contradiction itself is the truth.

And that’s what I find so extraordinary and delicious.

Shakespeare doesn’t resolve Hamlet into a neat psychological proposition.

He allows him to remain complicated.

Unpleasant.

Tender.

Cruel.

Brilliant.

Ridiculous.

And human.

I think of the famous idea associated with F. Scott Fitzgerald: that a first-rate intelligence is capable of holding two opposed ideas in mind while still retaining the ability to function.

Now, whether or not we accept that as a complete definition of intelligence, there’s something deeply valuable in the proposition.

The ability to hold contradictions.

To resist the temptation to simplify.

To recognize that two seemingly incompatible things may both contain some truth.

And I worry that we’re losing some of our appetite for this.

So much of our public discourse encourages us to define ourselves through certainty.

Through positions. Through identities.

Through belonging to one side or another.

We are encouraged to know what we believe, to announce it, to post about it, to defend it, and to identify those who disagree with us.

And certainly, convictions matter.

But what happens when conviction becomes incompatible with curiosity?

What happens when the desire to be right overwhelms the desire to understand?

Shakespeare offers us something different.

He gives us unpleasant heroes.

He gives us charming villains.

He gives us people who are capable of love and cruelty in the same breath. Throughout his 37 plays, people behave in bizarre ways.

And he asks us to spend time with them.

To listen.

To understand something of their humanity, even when we reject their actions.

Think about Richard III.

He’s monstrous.

And he’s funny!

He’s charismatic.

He’s theatrical.

He invites us into his confidence.

And before we know it, we’re enjoying the company of somebody who is doing truly terrible things.

What does that say about us?

Why are we so susceptible to charm?

Why do we sometimes find ourselves attracted to people whose behaviour we know to be appalling?

Those are uncomfortable questions.

But they’re important questions.

And they lead us to a much older theatrical tradition.

The Greeks and the civic imagination.

Shakespeare inherited a theatrical tradition that reaches back, through many influences, to ancient Greek drama.

And I find the relationship between theatre and civic life in ancient Athens fascinating.

Because theatre wasn’t simply a private entertainment. It was a public event. A communal encounter.

A place where a society could gather and confront some of its deepest anxieties and contradictions.

Ancient Athenian democracy was deeply limited by our standards: women, enslaved people, and many others were excluded from political citizenship.

But the relationship between civic life and theatrical experience was nevertheless extraordinary.

Think about the law (and so much of it we inherit from the Greeks and Romans).

The law has to make decisions.

It has to establish boundaries.

It has to determine responsibility.

It has to arrive at judgments. And rightly so.

But the theatre can take us into the human complexity that exists around those judgments.

The law may have to decide whether someone is guilty.

The theatre can ask us how that person came to do what they did.

What they believed. What they feared. What they loved.

What contradictions lived within them.

Think about Medea.

A mother who loves her children and nevertheless murders them.

How do we hold that?

How do we understand a human being capable of such an act?

Or Oedipus Rex.

A man of intelligence, authority, and determination.

A man who believes he can solve the great mysteries before him.

And whose pursuit of truth leads to the destruction of everything he thought he knew about himself.

These plays don’t offer us comfortable moral experiences.

They disturb us.

They force us to confront the limits of our understanding.

They remind us that human beings are not always consistent, rational, or even comprehensible to themselves.

And I think this is essential for the shaping of the young human mind.

Because if we cannot tolerate complexity in fictional human beings, how will we tolerate it in real ones?

If we cannot sit with contradiction in a classroom, how will we sit with it in our communities?

In our politics?

In our families?

In ourselves?

PART SIX: EDUCATION & THE DEMOCRATIC IMAGINATION

And this brings me to the larger argument I want to make today.

Because I don’t think the stakes are simply literary.

I don’t think this conversation is merely about whether Shakespeare deserves a place in the English curriculum.

I think the stakes are much greater than that.

We are engaged in one of the most ambitious social experiments in human history: the attempt to provide meaningful education to an entire population.

The aspiration of widespread public education, as we understand it today, is relatively recent.

Its development over the last few centuries has been one of the great achievements of modern societies.

But we are still learning how people learn. We are still discovering how minds develop. How curiosity is cultivated.

How intellectual confidence is formed.

How students come to understand themselves and the world around them.

And now, while we’re still grappling with those questions, we are living through a technological transformation of extraordinary speed.

We are asking schools to respond to changes in attention, communication, information, and culture that are unfolding much faster than many institutions can possibly adapt.

Sort of like my tragically futile exercise in trying to write a letter by hand...

And, indeed, in the middle of all this, we are tempted to simplify.

To streamline.

To remove difficult texts.

To replace complexity with accessibility.

And again, I want to be clear: I believe passionately in accessibility.

I believe that education should open doors, not close them.

But accessibility and simplicity are not the same thing.

Making something accessible should not necessarily mean making it easy.

It should mean creating the conditions in which someone can encounter something difficult and discover that they are capable of engaging with it.

That is what Mr. McLeod did for me.

He didn’t remove Shakespeare.

He gave me a way in.

And I think that distinction is absolutely essential.

Because what happens if we systematically remove the experiences that demand sustained attention?

What happens if we remove the texts that refuse to give us immediate answers?

What happens if we stop asking students to wrestle with difficult language, complicated ideas, and contradictory human beings?

What kinds of habits of mind are we cultivating?

And what kinds of habits are we losing?

Now, I don’t want to make the absurd claim that reading Shakespeare automatically makes someone a better citizen.

History would certainly disprove that.

Plenty of people have read Shakespeare and gone on to behave appallingly.

And Shakespeare is not the only writer capable of cultivating these abilities.

There are extraordinary, complex texts from every culture, every language, every literary tradition.

But Shakespeare is one of the great resources available to us.

And I think we should be very cautious about discarding him simply because he requires effort. Or because of that big brand.

Because democracy requires effort too.

Democracy requires patience.

It requires listening.

It requires the ability to consider perspectives other than our own.

It requires the ability to distinguish between what we know and what we merely believe.

It requires the willingness to reconsider our assumptions.

And perhaps most importantly, it requires us to live with people whose understanding of the world differs from ours.

Democracy is not an efficient system - very much like Shakespeare lacks efficiency.

It’s messy.

It’s frustrating.

It’s contradictory.

It’s often painfully slow.

And it asks us to do something very difficult: to remain in conversation with each other.

Even when we disagree.

Especially when we disagree.

And I worry that if we stop cultivating the intellectual and imaginative habits that make such conversations possible, our democratic institutions become increasingly fragile.

Because a democracy cannot function on information alone.

It needs interpretation.

It needs judgment.

It needs imagination.

It needs citizens who can resist the seduction of easy answers.

Citizens who can recognize manipulation.

Citizens who can sit with uncertainty without immediately surrendering to fear or anger.

And these are precisely the kinds of capacities that engaging seriously with complex literature can help us practise.

Shakespeare is practice.

Not because Shakespeare provides the answers.

But because Shakespeare gives us a place to practise living with the questions.

And I think that’s a profound distinction.

We’re not teaching students what to think.

We’re helping them discover how to think.

How to explore.

How to listen.

How to question.

How to remain curious when the answer isn’t immediately available.

How to resist the temptation to reduce the world to something simpler than it really is.

And in that sense, I think teaching Shakespeare can become a genuinely civic act.

An act of faith in the intellectual and imaginative capacities of young people.

PART SEVEN: RETURN TO THE CLASSROOM

And so I want to return, for a moment, to that classroom in Winnipeg in 2001.

To that eighteen-year-old Brazilian boy.

Who barely spoke English.

Who was frightened of the language.

Who was trying to find his place in a country that was still profoundly unfamiliar to him.

And who suddenly found himself in the company of Hamlet: a young man who didn’t understand the world around him. Who was confused.

Who was angry.

Who was frightened.

Who was trying to make sense of his existence.

And who, perhaps most importantly, didn’t have the answers.

To be. Or not to be.

I didn’t understand much of what Hamlet was saying.

I still don’t.

But somehow, I recognized something in the experience of trying to understand him.

I recognized the confusion.

The uncertainty.

The searching.

And through the extraordinary music of those words, I found a way into the English language. And a way into a new culture I'd later call home.

And eventually, a way into the theatre.

And eventually, a way into a life.

And I think about the extraordinary responsibility you have as educators.

Because you never quite know what you’re unlocking in a student.

You never know which sentence will stay with them.

Which poem will disturb them, or tickle their brain.

Which character will make them feel less alone.

Which moment of confusion might become the beginning of a lifelong curiosity.

And you certainly never know which eighteen-year-old immigrant sitting in your classroom might one day find himself talking to a room full of teachers about the extraordinary value of the very thing that once terrified him.

So I suppose my invitation to you today is this: don’t be afraid of the difficulty.

Don’t be afraid of the mystery.

Don’t be afraid of the moments when your students don’t understand.

And don’t feel that you must always provide an answer. Shakespeare doesn't provide answers, so why should you?!

Give them permission to explore.

Give them permission to play.

Give them permission to put the words in their mouths and discover what happens.

To find the beat.

Help them find pleasure in the effort.

Help them. Find pleasure. In the effort.

Help them discover that their minds are capable of more than they imagined.

Because we don’t teach Shakespeare simply because the world needs more Shakespeare scholars.

We teach Shakespeare because the world needs people who can pay attention.

People who can imagine.

People who can listen.

People who can hold contradictions.

People who can remain curious in the face of uncertainty.

People who can recognize the complicated humanity of others.

And if we lose our capacity to cultivate those things, I fear we stand to lose something far greater than a place in the curriculum: we risk losing some of the very capacities that allow us to live together.

So perhaps, in the end, the most radical thing we can offer a young person today is not another answer.

Not another shortcut.

Not another way to make everything faster, easier, or more efficient.

Perhaps it’s the invitation to stop.

To listen.

To encounter something difficult.

And to discover that they don’t have to understand everything in order to begin.

Because sometimes, the beginning of understanding is simply the courage to say:

I don’t know.

And then to stay.

To listen.

To wonder.

To play. To play. To play. To play. To Play.

da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM...