RSC launches new
manifesto for Shakespeare in schools
You can’t
force kids to love Shakespeare
Michael Pennington, Guardian blog,
In announcing its manifesto
Stand Up For Shakespeare, the RSC is claiming success at teaching Shakespeare
to children as young as four.
Now, steady on! It
very much depends what you mean by teaching and what you mean by Shakespeare.
Reception class kids role-play all the time but I can’t think of a single one
of Shakespeare’s works they would be expected really to grasp, or why they
should be troubled with difficult words while they’re still trying to sort out
their own.
Never mind. Every
good idea needs a strapline, and this is it for this one. A catchy title is all
the more necessary since the idea is far from new. Smaller, dedicated companies
and teachers have been trying to help kids develop a love of Shakespeare for
years. What is good about this latest initiative is that it is something that
the RSC’s resources should obviously be applied to, and now they will.
No one could
possibly disagree with the message. Certainly children come to appreciate
Shakespeare more by doing it themselves, on their feet, tasting the language
rather than studying it. They need to see it live rather than be told about it,
and that before the hormones start to flow.
But most people’s
stories of being captivated by Shakespeare are the result not of an organised
policy but of some unexpected chance, a charismatic teacher or a lucky visit to
the theatre. I was blown away by Macbeth when I was eleven but, stage struck as
I was, the same play was nearly killed for me as a teenager by dull teaching. I
once helped an eleven-year-old play Juliet’s father and watched him grasp for
the first time what it was to be a disobeyed parent rather than a young rebel.
I’ve heard young teenagers after a matinee arguing the pros and cons of
Hotspur’s and Hal’s claims to the throne on
Not long ago, my
nine-year-old granddaughter delighted me after seeing Twelfth Night by saying
that she thought Malvolio was treated
too cruelly. He only did all that stuff with the yellow stockings to impress
Olivia, she said. She also rather disapproved of Olivia’s transferring her
affections from the cross-dressed Viola to her male twin, because loving
someone’s appearance is only the start. That is the kind of reaction we all
want; it gives us hope for the future, and not just for the theatre.
So though the RSC
blueprint is good, how is it to be achieved? Are practitioners going to go in
for single sessions, move on to another school and leave teachers to carry on
their work? For every teacher capable of doing this, another one will not be
able to. The relationship that’s going to matter is the long term one between
teachers and practitioners, and what they can generate between them.
And one more thing:
it’s not compulsory to love Shakespeare. The kids should choose for themselves,
having had a chance to suck it and see. The moment they feel they’re being
coerced everything falls to the ground. It’s hard to make policy and pass marks
out of something that should be loved for its own sake or not at all.