[John Cole]

So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forcéd cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on the inventors' heads.

A few lines from Hamlet, underlined by Harry Truman the night before he decided to drop the A bomb. I guess someone found it relevant. And I would venture that he knew more about Shakespeare than the inner workings of the A bomb.

By the way, how many students who took trig or physics designed my heating system or internal combustion engine. I will concede that it useful for some to know Bernoulli's Equation, but I maintain that it is just as necessary for people to be exposed to great works of literature. And if they are hard, they're hard. Reading hard books teaches students how to read hard books. "Bored to tears" often equals "can't undertand," but the latter term really comes before the former. Hell, I was "bored to tears" in math class because I couldn't understand it. But I'm not foolish enough to believe that math instruction should stop at addition and subtraction, which is what you seem to want to do with literature.

And, teach students the dirty bits in Shakespeare, and they'll actively try to decipher the text. What do you think Hamlet meant by "country matters"?