Cambridge students who need ‘trigger warnings’ about sex and murder in Shakespeare may as well read Noddy

SHAkESpEARE’S Titus Andronicus contains a rape, mutilation, murder and a scene in which someone inadvertently eats their own children served up in a pie.

Not very nice, is it? Wouldn’t it be better for young men and women to read Enid Blyton’s stories of Noddy?

That is what some at Cambridge University’s English faculty seem to think.

It has been revealed that students are being given ‘trigger warnings’ about lectures on Titus Andronicus and other works in case they are upset.

The assumption is that young people nowadays, the ‘snowflake generation’, are too sensitive to be able to undertake a study of the tragedies of Shakespeare.

Censored

It will be interesting to see if other universities follow suit.

In Glasgow, students of theology are warned that they might be confronted with the upsetting fact that Jesus was crucified — and I want to come back to that in a moment.

No doubt those in authority at these universities believe that by protecting young people from tragedy, they are doing them a kindness. The exact opposite is the truth.

Students who are given time to watch, read and discuss the tragedies of ancient Greece, or of Elizabethan theatre, above all of Shakespeare, are being offered the chance not just to savour some of the finest works of art ever created but to examine the human condition.

Some cloth-eared philistine, concerned with the ‘pastoral care’ of students, might think it their duty to censor the last scene of Hamlet, in which just about everyone in the Danish court appears to have been poisoned, stabbed or mutilated.

But such an act would deprive a student of the chance to undertake one of the greatest moral and aesthetic adventures it is possible to have — to know Shakespeare’s masterpiece, with all its searing questions about who we are and what we are doing on this planet.

Not to know Shakespeare’s tragedies is to miss out on something central not just to academic study but life itself.

By protecting students from tragedy, teachers are doing them a grave disservice.

Some 2,300 years ago, a doctor’s son called Aristotle, who had been tutor to the infant Alexander the Great, meditated on the reason we benefit from watching tragedy.

It was, he believed, because watching it excites in us two primal emotions — fear (of what’s about to happen) and pity (for the central character) — and then purges us of those emotions in a process called ‘ catharsis’ as the drama reaches its climax. We leave the theatre cleansed and uplifted, with a greater understanding of what it is to be human.

Aristotle studied in Athens in the century following the Golden Age, during which perhaps the greatest tragedies ever composed were written and performed.

The Greek tragedies by the three great practitioners — Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides — are still performed today and still electrifying to audiences. They are not for the faint-hearted.

When, in Sophocles’s drama Oedipus Rex, he discovers he has been unable to escape his predicted fate — having killed his father and slept with his mother — he puts out his own eyes.

Medea, in Euripides’ play of the same name, punishes her unfaithful husband Jason by murdering their children.

These dramas were concerned with the deepest questions facing their audience. Where does duty lie: to your family, or the State? Who is responsible for your misfortunes: the gods or yourself? How is it possible to deal with the worst things which fate can throw at you — the loss of loved ones, treachery, war, insane love, lust?

Today, we use the word ‘tragedy’ to apply not to plays, but to very sad items in the news. Yet I believe that when we contemplate such tragedies as the Grenfell Tower fire, or the Mexican earthquake, or the refugee crisis in Myanmar, we are undergoing something similar to the experience of seeing a tragedy in a theatre.

As mere observers, we can very often not do anything, except send a fiver to Oxfam; but this does not mean that we cannot learn. Fear and pity are part of life. It is up to us whether they make us better or worse people.

The Cambridge students who are too nervous to contemplate Othello murdering his wife out of insane jealousy, or Cleopatra holding a poisonous snake to her breast, or Lear, having suffered more than most of us could ever dread doing, entering the stage with his dead daughter in his arms with the words ‘Howl, howl, howl, howl!’ are missing out.

Dignity

They are missing out not on a single useful experience, but on

the central experience of human life: at any time, any one of us, as individuals or as a society, might be faced with sorrow which is literally unbearable: the death of a child, or the implosion, as in Syria, of an entire society around our ears.

Turn from such appalling scenes and look back to the Greeks, or go back to Shakespeare. You will find that they have been there before you.

This brings us back to those theology students of Glasgow, who are warned that they might be upset by the Crucifixion.

Is not the central tragedy, the story which has been at the heart of European civilisation since the 4th century, the Crucifixion of Christ?

Regardless of what people have believed about Jesus, they have been unable to avoid knowing how He died. The image of a young man dying in the most painful and disgusting manner imaginable hangs in churches, schools and houses all over the world.

Yet people have found hope in this image, consolation in the belief that Christ has entered into the darkest place of their own sufferings.

Even if you do not share this faith, you can see its potency — a power which would be completely lacking if Christian buildings removed the distressing pictures of the cross for fear of upsetting the snowflakes.

Long ago, when I was on the parent-teacher association of a Church of England school, we used to receive complaints from the more tender-hearted parents about the fact that an image of Christ on the Cross hung in the classrooms.

They objected that children were taught the Hail Mary (it was a High Church school) with its imprecation that we should be prayed for ‘now and at the hour of our death’. Surely the children were too young to be told about death?

In those days, such objections were overruled. Now, I suspect, they would have to be taken more seriously.

The nice people who want to protect the young from reality are failing to provide them with the tools with which to face that sad thing which the rest of us call life.

Hamlet is upsetting. Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex is upsetting. The Gospels are upsetting. That is because life is upsetting. Merely to be ‘upset’, however, is unworthy of us as human beings.

At one of the most dreadful moments of king Lear, in which we have watched untold horror, a son tells his father who has had his eyes gouged out: ‘Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither.’ In other words, we come into this world howling with pain, and we are quite likely to leave it likewise.

If we can not ‘endure’ reading or studying such works, how can we be expected to endure the very real tragedies which afflict our world — and to do so with the dignity of those we most admire?