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Why Study Shakespeare?
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Why Study Shakespeare?
I remember talking to a Physics student in my third year at university, who asked me a question that has preoccupied me ever since, what made Shakespeare the best writer in history? Every pupil will go throughout their school life with the assumption that Shakespeare is like trigonometry, Bunsen burners and bad canteen food, an integral and unquestionable element of the secondary education system. But how often do pupils think about why and how a writer whose works are more than four hundred years old has fought off thousands upon thousands of other writers to claim this top spot?
I suspect that this inability to see Shakespeare as anything other than an unchallengeable fact cultivates the destructive approach to his works that some teachers enforce upon their students. The idea is that to pass the examination, a pupil just has to learn the plot, the character descriptions, the themes, the theories, a few quotations and the odd remark on iambic pentameter, regurgitate them in an essay and leave. What is nearly always left out of this approach is that the words on the page are less than half of what makes Shakespeare the greatest writer.
Teachers may well plan the occasional exercise to nod vaguely in this direction, forcing the class to choose a section and stumble through the words for twenty minutes whilst standing up. The exercise serves as a brief reminder that these words were actually meant to be spoken on the stage, but from my own experience barring the odd thespian-in-waiting, most pupils are left looking embarrassed and bewildered by this experience, relieved when they are allowed to hide behind their books once more.
Most of my own memories of studying Shakespeare at secondary school revolve around experiences such as these. I recall the class reading aloud from the text at a snail’s pace and wondering how words that can sound so wonderful when spoken by actors can sound so dull when reproduced in the monotones of uninspired school children. It was not until I reached university that I was introduced to a pioneering new approach to teaching Shakespeare. And it was through this that I began to come to some conclusions about why Shakespeare is our country’s most revered writer.
At the University of Warwick, virtually next door to Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Shakespearian studies have developed into an art form in their own right. In my third year I was offered a choice between a fairly conventional seminar-based Shakespeare course and a brand new method of teaching Shakespeare with which they were experimenting for the first time. Dubbed ‘Shakespeare without Chairs’ the idea behind this technique was to teach Shakespeare through movement. It was not a performance-based class and there were no Olivier awards on offer. Rather each week we looked at selected scenes from the plays and noted the way in which the staging of these extracts could alter the entire dynamic of the play.
For example we learnt that Romeo and Juliet could be wrapped up three acts early purely as a result of Lord Capulet failing to position his body in front of Tybalt. Or that one of the pivotal scenes from The Winter’s Tale was not about the characters that spoke but instead revolved entirely around two guards, whose physical actions were exposing the real fight taking place beneath the layers of language. Or that The Taming of the Shrew could switch instantly from tragedy to comedy based on the body language used between Kate and Petruchio. What the workshops helped to demonstrate far more effectively than the traditional seminar format was that for all the thousands of books written about the playwright, for all the stage productions and film adaptations, Shakespeare is still the “undiscovered country” where the landscape always changes.
This is why Shakespeare is an unshakeable element of the National Curriculum. His words are always interacting physically with the audience, making them wonder and question the vital elements of human nature. Shakespeare cannot be captured on a page because his language is infused with the spirit of movement, always opening up new meanings and possibility. Shakespeare clinches the spot as England’s greatest writer for the same reason that anyone can make it to the top, because his writing works harder than anybody else’s
Article Author : Joanna Woods
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