Tomorrow, 22nd September, the Royal Shakespeare Company launches a
major campaign looking at the way in which Shakespeare is taught and
assessed in our schools and colleges.
Aware of the fact that many young people leave school with the impression
that Shakespeare is ‘boring’, the RSC is looking for a radical
re-evaluation of the way that children are introduced to the Bard in
the classroom.
Calling for a theatre-based approach to teaching Shakespeare and a
re-evaluation of assessment techniques by the Government, the RSC’s
Teaching Shakespeare: Time For Change campaign gets underway
on Friday 22 September 2006, with an opening symposium being held at
The Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. The aims of the symposium are:
To coincide with the launch of the campaign, below some of the country’s
best known writers, politicians, actors and personalities recall their
first encounters with the Bard:
Michael Parkinson:
“Shakespeare at Barnsley Grammar School was regarded as an obligation
rather than a pleasure…I gained no joy from the experience –
nor was I expected to. The problem was that no-one attempted to put
Shakespeare into context so the plays and poetry were just words.
What changed my perception of Shakespeare, what made me first understand
what a magnificent dramatist he was and how relevant to the world
I live in, was when I saw Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando
as Marc Antony…In my last year at grammar school we had a young
teacher with a flair for drama who further increased my appetite for
his work. This teacher was very theatrical and therefore interesting
in his approach”
Jenny Eclair:
“Just some clues as to what the plays were about would have been
useful. It’s unbelievable now that I could have sat through exams
unsure of some of the characters names – never mind their intentions.
I’ve seen some [Shakespeare] – well one – I saw Trevor
Nunn’s Hamlet and I got it – I liked the way it suddenly
came across as a posh Jerry Springer scenario. But I’d rather
more effort and energy was put into finding and producing new work.”
Chris Smith (Lord Smith of Finsbury):
“I remember learning Shakespeare in the classroom and it was
the most discouraging experience imaginable. We read plays round the
class, speech by speech, desk by desk, without even assigning particular
characters to particular people; and it is difficult to envisage anything
more likely to drain all the fire and meaning and magic out of a play
than this. The moment it went onto the stage, however, it was transformed.
And I recall a moment I went to see King Lear on the stage
during the [Edinburgh] festival…it was one of the most overwhelming
theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. Suddenly the language came
alive. “This playwright is good” I shouted to myself. It
was a moment of real discovery. I’ve since come back to reading
the plays…deriving huge pleasure and enlightenment from doing
so: but that would be impossible without the real drama on the stage
as a backdrop.”
Phil Jupitus:
“Our set text was Henry IV part 1 and it became obvious
at an early stage that some of my classmates had studied Shakespeare
before and were into the groove really quickly. Those of us who were
first timers were in a bit of a pickle. It was my experience that
different teachers would focus on a different facet of the text. So
for the first year of preparation we had a guy who was obsessed with
meter and the rhythm of the verse. Then the next year we were streamed
into different groups and the new guy was fixated on character. In
short, my teachers ruined Shakespeare for me. We'd read stuff out
in class but it went no further than that. I was picked as Falstaff
on a number of occasions simply because I was a fat kid.
"It would have been beneficial to see the texts up on their
feet at an earlier stage. There's something quite dis-spiriting about
just hammering away at it on the page. I love to watch now, mostly
for the bounce and rhythm of the verse. When you see someone doing
Shakespeare who gets the meter it's a beautiful thing...”
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:
“We had a new drama teacher, beautiful, tall and blonde. Joyce
Mann decided to shake things up by producing Romeo and Juliet
for a drama competition. She, a white woman, decided to cast black
Africans as the Montagues and Asian Africans as the Capulets. It was
radical, the right thing to do, but naïve. She didn’t know
just how deeply divided we were. I was Juliet. Romeo was like a ballet
dancer, had smooth reflective skin and treacle eyes…[Mrs Mann]
had to train us to kiss properly on the mouth, alone in a classroom
away from horrified eyes. The play was lauded and I won the best actress
prize…I rushed home, an elated Juliet. But these possibilities
were callously snuffed out by my family, my father most of all, who
punished me with a deadly silence. We are living his plays not merely
watching them…Although it hurt for years, and still does, the
fallout from that production proved invaluable.”
David Oyelowo:
“My first impression of Shakespeare was that it wasn’t relevant
to me. It was a bit like opera, in that I’m sure there are people
who love it but it doesn’t really float my boat - and that was
primarily because I thought it wasn’t relevant and I was intimidated
by the language. I hadn’t seen great Shakespeare performed –
in fact I don’t think I’d seen any Shakespeare so these
were all my preconceptions outside of experience really. The thing
that worked for me in terms of being taught Shakespeare was putting
it on its feet. Having a teacher who understood the plays, who had
an enthusiasm for the plays and who took us to see great productions
of the plays. I remember being asked to put the balcony scene between
Romeo and Juliet into our own words so that it became relevant to
us and we really understood the whole dynamic of the scene. Those
were the things that made me feel like Shakespeare was relevant to
me and therefore something that I wanted to invest in.”
Polly Toynbee:
Both my best English teachers taught Shakespeare as acting, performing
themselves as they strode up and down, but mainly forcing performances
out of our stumbling readings. Putting on a Shakespeare every year
made the whole class love it. Not only the words of those particular
plays but the language itself stays in the mind forever. I went [to
the theatre] nearly every Saturday afternoon with my older sister
to sit in the Gods at the Old Vic long ago when they ran a different
Shakespeare in rep every week. Never a dull moment, I was gripped
from a young age.
"The idea of teaching Shakespeare as a dry text without acting
it is not only deadly drudgery - but wrong. It is written to be spoken.
I was always a fan because I first came across it very young as live
performance, long before I ever saw it on the page. Children should
always see it or act it before they study it."
Brian Sewell:
“An inspiring teacher, Irene Johnstone, launched us, at 11, into
Macbeth, first reading and then playing the roles; we learned
the language and understood the characters as we went along, and neither
Macbeth nor his wife was, at the end, quite what we had thought at
the beginning. Boys played female roles without embarrassment –
we were told at once that that was how things were in Shakespeare’s
day and that Lady Macbeth’s part was written for a boy with an
unbroken voice. The theatrical approach was vital – but is had
to be controlled by a really good passionate teacher; the business
broke down in the hands of plodding masters and we were better on
our own.”
Janet Suzman:
I was lucky – I had a young English teacher who was perfectly
cast for Rosalind and knew it, so she acted her way through the whole
of As You Like It in class and I was smitten with Shakespeare.
Our teacher made us read aloud – which makes all the difference.
You can’t do plays sitting down.
"I saw a touring production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
with Irene Worth as Titania and Paul Rogers as Bottom. I realized
that there’s magic in words because you can change the meaning
of a word by the way you say it. Speech is nuanced. So is everyday
life. Words are power and good words are good power. As long as English
teachers realize that all the information about a character is embedded
in the text of a Shakespeare play and that all actors use the text
to search for clues, then they have no need to do improvisations that
don’t shed any light!"
Kenneth Branagh:
“I had seen my first Shakespeare at the St George’s Theatre,
Tufnell Park, when I was fourteen. It was a hysterical schools’
matinee of Romeo and Juliet, with David Collings as a thrilling
Mercutio. Peter McEnery and Sarah Badel gave wonderful performances
of the lovers. The whole production was rough and thrilling, completely
dispelling the classroom image of Shakespeare as boring…Now that
I’d found my vocation, theatre-going was a wonderful adventure…such
as my first momentous visit to see Hamlet. There was a new
production playing at the theatre in Oxford; I asked Jayne Thurgood,
a girlfriend whom I was trying to impress, and we took the train from
Reading. I was completely bowled over and so was my companion…It
seemed unbelievably dramatic, dark and rich to look at, full of exciting
lighting effects. The production had tremendous pace and the acting
was passionate and electric.”
Paul O’Grady:
“My first encounter was a performance of Macbeth at the
Liverpool Everyman Theatre. Lady Macbeth is my favourite Shakespearean
character – I always identified with her and thought she was
a very sensible woman. Very like the Wicked Queen in Snow White which
is another character very close to my heart.”
