Before we argue—again—about whether Shakespeare is still relevant, it’s worth watching a three-minute clip that does more to answer the question than any curriculum guide ever could.
On The Late Show, Ian McKellen closes an interview with Stephen Colbert by performing a speech written over 400 years ago. The words come from Sir Thomas More, a play never staged in William Shakespeare’s lifetime but widely attributed—at least in part—to him.
McKellen doesn’t modernize the language.
He doesn’t explain it.
He just performs it.
And suddenly, the room changes.
The speech is addressed to a mob angry at “strangers”—immigrants. Instead of scolding them, the speaker does something far more dangerous: he asks them to imagine. Imagine families forced to leave. Imagine being driven out. Imagine becoming the stranger yourself.
That move—imagine this is happening to you—lands just as hard now as it did in the early 1600s.
This is the moment worth showing students.
Not because it’s Shakespeare trivia.
Not because it’s historically interesting.
But it reveals what Shakespeare actually does when he’s at his best.
He doesn’t tell audiences what to think.
He doesn’t offer slogans or easy answers.
He uses language to stretch empathy, flip perspectives, and force the listener into moral discomfort.
When McKellen delivers the lines, you can feel it: this isn’t “old English.” This is a warning. A mirror. A test of imagination.
This is also why Shakespeare still belongs in classrooms.
Students don’t need Shakespeare because he’s canonical.
They need him because he trains a skill we desperately need more of: the ability to see ourselves in someone else’s place.
When we teach Shakespeare as a decoding exercise—translate the words, answer the questions, move on—we miss the point. Shakespeare was writing for performance, for crowds, for moments like this one, where language interrupts complacency.
If students can watch this clip and feel its weight, then the question isn’t “Why are we still teaching Shakespeare?”
The question is “What happens when we stop teaching students how to imagine?”
And Shakespeare, inconveniently, still has some of the best words for that job.
The Stranger’s Case
Grant them [the immigrants] removed.
And grant that this your noise hath chid down all the majesty of England. Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, their babies at their backs with their poor luggage, plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation; and that you sit as kings in your desires, authority quite silenced by your brawl, and you in ruff of your opinions clothed. What have you got?
I’ll tell you: you have taught how insolence and strong hand should prevail, how order should be quelled. And by this pattern not one of you should live an aged man; for other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, with self‑same hand, self reason and self‑right, would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes feed on one another.
You’ll put down strangers, kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses. Oh, desperate as you are, wash your foul minds with tears; and those same hands that you, like rebels, lift against the peace, lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees, make them your feet to kneel, to be forgiven.
And say now the king, as he is clement if the offender mourn, should so much come too short of your great trespass as but to banish you. Whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error, should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders, to any German province, Spain or Portugal—anywhere that not adheres to England—why, you must needs be strangers.
Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper, that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth; set their detested knives against your throats, spurn you like dogs, and, like as if that God owned not nor made not you, nor that the elements were all appropriate to your comforts, but chartered unto them?
What would you think, to be thus used?
This is the stranger’s case; and this your mountainish inhumanity…
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