The play’s the thing: ‘droning’ teachers should leave the Bard alone, says Mirren
Doyenne of the RSC says children must experience Shakespeare on the stage before the classroom
THE whining schoolboy of William Shakespeare’s seven ages of man speech would no doubt agree: Dame Helen Mirren has said “droning” teachers are ruining the Bard and his works should be kept out of the classroom.
Dame Helen, 75, who began her career with the Royal Shakespeare Company, has said Shakespeare should be dropped from curriculums in favour of more engaging live performances.
Her views have been described as “elitist” by academics who say it is vital that the Bard’s dramatic and poetic works are offered to all children, and not just the fortunate few from cultivated families.
“I don’t think Shakespeare should be taught in schools,” Dame Helen told RSC artistic director Gregory Doran during an online event. “All young people’s experience of Shakespeare should be live theatre.”
Dame Helen has claimed that “droning through Shakespeare aged 11 or 12” can immunise children to the beauty of the Bard rather than inspire them to admire it. She has argued that pupils should see one of his plays first, and if they remain interested after getting a taste of Elizabethan drama then they should “go back to the text”.
As an actress whose early performances included As You Like It and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and who took a turn as Lady Macbeth, she has emphasised the importance of feeling over academic appreciation. In Shakespeare Dame Helen finds “you have to go through the head, but I [want] it not just to stay in the head.” She said the challenge with his work is “making this sometimes archaic language alive and accessible… not alienating”. Live performances instead of reading a set text in classrooms could be a way to engage younger people, she said.
Sir Stanley Wells, president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and a literary scholar, said: “She represents an essentially elitist attitude. If Shakespeare were not taught in schools only children from cultivated families would hear of him... Of course there is bad teaching as well as good but that doesn’t invalidate the good.”
The editor of the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare added: “Don’t damn them, encourage them, and don’t take Shakespeare off the curriculum.
I’m all for the democratisation of culture. Teaching it helps to spread culture, individually, and the country’s.”
Dame Helen also praised efforts to update the plays on stage. New performances have been at the forefront of diversity and experimenting with the gender of leads. The actress has welcomed the innovation, saying during the online Talking Shakespeare event: “I’m so happy now that women can do Hamlet, do Richard III, do Lear, as
Glenda [Jackson] just did. “It certainly was beyond any possibility when I was in my 20, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. It was just impossible.”
On Monday night came a provocation from Helen Mirren. Chatting to RSC artistic director Gregory Doran via Zoom for his latest Talking Shakespeare livestream, she said: “My theory is, I don’t think Shakespeare should be taught in schools… All young people’s [first] experience of Shakespeare should be… watching it in the theatre.” Stage should come before page.
Thinking aloud, she argued that an early age group – she cited 11- to 12-year-olds – could well be bored “droning through Shakespeare” and bamboozled by the “difficult language”, unable to “understand what anyone’s talking about”. She wasn’t discounting tuition per se, but advancing the primacy of performance for those crucial initial encounters. “Let them experience it live. I feel that very strongly.”
It’s an arresting sentiment, a seductive one, and – in my view
– an entirely wrong one. Doran’s agreement with Mirren forces me to go head to head on this.
Of course the kingpin at the RSC – particularly at this grim, virus-struck hour – would advance the need for a suck-it-and-see approach to the Bard’s genius; part of his job entails justifying the performance side of the Shakespeare industry. And of course any good Shakespearean actor will have a benign bias in favour of bums on seats. But it’s time we stood up for the scholastic method of gaining acquaintance with the world’s greatest playwright.
I don’t discount the transformative power of an early years visit to the theatre. Mirren talked of seeing an am-dram Hamlet at a tender age and being smitten – not knowing what happened next meant it gripped her like a thriller. But not everyone has the good fortune to be taken to the theatre; many children never set foot inside an auditorium for theatre, classical or otherwise (despite the best efforts of institutions such as the RSC to improve access). The
We need to fight hard to banish the idea that studying Shakespeare is really a chore
barriers – financial and social – remain largely in place.
Also, we do our children – not to mention Shakespeare – a disservice by assuming that they have to be coaxed into interest with a hands-on approach: let the kids have fun and they’ll learn faster. There is also the fact that, in hindsight, we often romanticise school trips something rotten. They are breeding grounds for wriggling, gossiping and a runaway interest in the interval ice cream. But even when they’re enthralling, it’s much better if groundwork has been done beforehand.
My first Shakespeare was an achingly bucolic production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 1985 (Ralph Fiennes was Cobweb!), almost on the eve of taking my O-level Eng Lit paper. It was memorable and useful, but I’d already been converted by the cerebral challenge in the classroom; I had long enjoyed acquaintance with bully Bottom, proud Titania and jealous Oberon.
My memory of the Bard at school is of grind, certainly, but not of tedium: a teacher asking us what such-andsuch a line or phrase meant, and everyone scratching their heads, some venturing a thought, and a revelation emerging through a fog of unknowing, like the solution to a cryptic maths problem. There are no shortcuts to “getting” Shakespeare; that’s part of the reward. When teacher and pupils set out on a journey of exploration, the adult a guide but not infallible, the Shakespearean stage picture starts to be assembled in the mind’s eye.
Of course, many a child has been put off by poor, ploddy teaching. Indeed, the insipid imparting of Milton at my own alma mater left me with little passion for Paradise Lost. Some are more constitutionally keen on drama, by default. But there’s no reason why a bit of application can’t work wonders, just as there’s no given that a theatre trip will prove a treat.
The school outing to watch Shakespeare in performance is reportedly on the wane – beset by cost-cutting and logistics; it’s a relative luxury worth fighting to preserve. But the battle needs to be fought hardest in banishing the idea that study is a chore.
The arguments about how best to appreciate the Bard go back for centuries. The Romantic-era essayist Charles Lamb, who did so much to coax youthful interest in the Complete Works via his Tales from Shakespeare, suggested his plays were “less calculated for performance… than those of almost any other dramatist whatever”, so deeply did they take you into the mind of a character. He still has a point. The bare text, not the show, is the thing.