Should Taylor Swift be taught alongside Shakespeare? A professor of literature says yes

• It’s 2024 and he was born in 1564, and she’s only 34.
• Sliding her into the classroom would be yet another example of a dumbed-down curriculum.
• Well, the dates might be, but not the assumptions – about Shakespeare, about English, about teaching, and about Swift.
• In Sweet Nothing, on the Midnights album, she sings:
  On the way home
  I wrote a poem
  You say “What a mind”
  This happens all the time.
• Read more:
  How did Taylor Swift get so popular?

An ally of literature

• Regardless of what The Tortured Poets Department ends up being about, Swift is already a firm ally of literature and reading.
• It’s that the discipline of English literature is flexible, capacious and open-minded.
• A class on reading Swift’s work as literature is just another English class, because every English class requires grappling with the idea of reading anything as literature.
• A class on reading Swift’s work as literature is just another English class, because every English class requires grappling with the idea of reading anything as literature.
• I will be teaching Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets together in a literature unit at the University of Sydney this semester.

Teaching Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets

• I also teach three modern artworks that shed contemporary light on the sonnets.
• Bervin prints a selection of the sonnets, one per page, in grey text.
• In each of these grey sonnets, some of Shakespeare’s words and phrases are printed in black and thus stand out boldly.
• Unlike Bervin’s and Kennard’s collections, in which individual pieces relate to specific sonnets, there is no explicit adaptation.

Deep connection

• The fun challenge of writing a pop song is squeezing those evocative details into the catchiest melody you can possibly think of.
• I thrive on the challenge of sprinkling personal mementos and shreds of reality into a genre of music that is universally known for being, well, universal.
• Her point is that the pop songs that “cut through the most are actually the most detailed” in their snippets of reality and biography.
• She says “people are reaching out for connection and comfort” and “music lovers want some biographical glimpse into the world of our narrator, a hole in the emotional walls people put up around themselves to survive”.
• Swift claims that Midnights lets listeners in through her protective walls to enable deep connection:
  I really don’t think I’ve delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before.

• This connects very well with the agenda of Midnights.
• Swift’s songs and Shakespeare’s Sonnets are meditations on deeply personal aspects of their narrators’ experiences.
• Swift’s persona is that of a self-reflective singer, just as Shakespeare’s is that of a self-reflective sonneteer.

Close reading

Shakespeare’s sonnets are rewarding texts for close reading because of their poetic intricacy. Students can look at end rhymes and internal rhymes, the way the argument progresses through quatrains, the positioning of the “turn”, which is often in line 9 or 13, and the way the final couplet wraps things up (or doesn’t).

• Karma and Mastermind are simpler, yet contain plenty of metaphoric language to be unpacked for meaning and aesthetic effectiveness.
• Such unexpected pairings are valuable because they require close attention and careful articulation of what is similar and what is not.
• How about High Infidelity and Sonnet 138 (where love and self-deception coexist), considered in terms of truth in relationships?
• There is nothing to lose and plenty to gain in teaching Swift’s Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets together.

Liam E Semler receives research funding from the Better Strangers project which is a collaborative education research project between the University of Sydney and Barker College. Better Strangers hosts the Shakespeare Reloaded website (https://shakespearereloaded.edu.au/) and explores innovative approaches to teaching and learning Shakespeare.