In one of those curious coincidences that seem to illumine our lives, I found myself on the morning of 15 November 1978, having completed at last a draft of this book, listening to a radio report of the death of Margaret Mead. I was not only saddened but profoundly disturbed. For as long as I have had this project in mind – which is almost as long as I have been talking to students about Shakespeare – I have intended to give it the title it bears, a title frankly borrowed, in great admiration, from Mead’s first major anthropological work. I began my lecture that morning – a lecture rather appropriately concerned with the nature of love in As You Like It – by announcing the news of Mead’s death to the class. When they seemed indifferent I was freshly disturbed. Had they not been listening to me all term? How could they not see – as I tried to explain to them – how much my approach to Shakespeare resembled, and was indebted to, Mead’s approach to the nature of primitive societies?
Of course, I expected too much. My students’ minds were full of other important matters – the weekend impended, and so did the paper deadline. Many had doubtless not yet read As You Like It – perhaps some had never heard of Margaret Mead. Few recognized that the study of Elizabethan culture and language was at all relevant to our own. But it is nonetheless in the spirit of Mead’s inquiry into the cultures of other peoples, and in particular the process of maturation, that this book was written – and will, I hope, be read. I should like therefore to quote the final paragraph of her introduction to Coming of Age in Samoa as a brief preface to my own argument – substituting only the name of the civilization I propose to explore for that which she has so vividly documented, and noting that similarities, as well as contrasts, are frequently to be found between the practices and beliefs of the two societies.
Because of the particular problem which we set out to answer, this tale of another way of life is mainly concerned with education, with the process by which the baby, arrived cultureless upon the human scene, becomes a full-fledged adult member of his or her society. The strongest light will fall upon the ways in which [Shakespearean] education, in its broadest sense, differs from our own. And from this contrast we may be able to turn, made newly and vividly self-conscious and self-critical, to judge anew and perhaps fashion differently the education we give our children.