Theatre

Most people involved in the teaching of Shakespeare in schools gave a loud cheer in October when the Key Stage 3 tests were abolished in spite of – or rather because of – the fact that they included a Shakespeare paper. Many experts – such as those in the education departments at the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe – profoundly believe that Shakespeare should be studied as drama and not as literature and are delighted that while Shakespeare is still compulsory, there are now opportunities to study the plays in different ways. ‘Do it on your feet. See it live. Start it earlier’ is the very reasonable mantra of the RSC’s education department.

Before the bunting was put away, however, the RSC got some unexpected feedback. Jacqui O’Hanlon, the RSC’s director of education, started hearing from anxious teachers. ‘They said that they were confused about the status of Shakespeare now and that line managers wouldn’t release them for professional development courses because they felt that Shakespeare is
no longer a priority.’ Some clearly felt that this was an opportunity to spend less time on 400-year-old plays, and more on the topical and apparently more ‘relevant’ books by the likes of Melvyn Burgess and Jacqueline Wilson. Comments have also appeared on the Times Educational Supplement website from teachers who feel that teaching Shakespeare today is just too
much hard work. Feature continues

I have to admit that on reading about this, my first response was not the altruistic one of outrage that not all children would be given the opportunity to discover for themselves whether or not they like Shakespeare’s plays. It was more a sense that this was the beginning of the end – a fear that audiences for Shakespeare would in the future be made up of those who had been to independent schools and those few who were prepared to make the effort to decode an increasingly foreign language. Like Noh theatre in Japan, Shakespeare would be seen and read by just a few fervent admirers. Instead of reaching out to as many people as possible, he would only please a few.

Fortunately, this nightmare scenario is unlikely to come to pass. For a start, Shakespeare is still a compulsory part of the curriculum. Patrick Spottiswoode, the Globe’s director of education, points out that there was a time in the 1980s when Shakespeare did drop out of the timetable altogether. ‘Theoretically, you could go through your entire school career and go on to get a PhD on an English [literature] topic without ever having read a Shakespeare play.’ At the same time, teachers were keen to ‘translate’ the plays into modern English, which has always seemed an odd idea to me, since the plots were invariably borrowed from someone else and it is in the language that Shakespeare’s genius lies.

Nowadays, that language is confronted head-on at secondary, primary and even pre-school level. Jonothan Neelands, programme director at the Institute of Education at Warwick University, remains optimistic about teachers’ responses and believes they are becoming much better at how they introduce the language. ‘Part of the problem,’ he says, ‘is that it’s a lottery whether or not you have a teacher who is determined to overcome the obstacles of language and complexity. We shouldn’t make assumptions about who should and shouldn’t get Shakespeare. It is possible to turn all learners on to his work and create this experience that everyone can have together.’ The RSC, concentrating on getting students to consider the questions ‘What’s Shakespeare ever done for us?’ and ‘Why do we still study Shakespeare?’, by no means shuns the most difficult schools.

Spottiswoode believes that even if Shakespeare were to be abolished in schools, it would still take a long time for the language to become impenetrable. ‘Context is all. If I read some American film scripts, I probably won’t understand a lot of the words, but hearing them in context allows me to skate over particular words that are incomprehensible to my ear as a Londoner.’ The linguistics expert and Shakespearean scholar David Crystal is equally optimistic. In a piece entitled ‘To modernise or not to modernise: there is no question’, he points out that surprisingly, unlike the period between Chaucer and Shakespeare, that between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries has seen relatively slow change, and that out of all Shakespeare’s vast vocabulary, over 90 per cent of the words are still easy to understand.

There can be no doubt that the more you put into Shakespeare, the more you are likely to get out of him. But my fears
that we will soon be following the surtitles instead of the action are, thank God, still a long way from being realised.