The Bard, early on

There are many ways middleclass parents in english Canada can improve the odds of their kids’ success in the gruelling race of life. They can have their children take French immersion, learn to play the piano, do yoga.

Memorizing Shakespeare would not seem to be high on the list of these useful activities. yet Ken Ludwig, a noted english playwright, in his How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, believes it is as valuable as any of the above. He starts the book with two premises that might arouse skepticism. The first is stated by actor John Lithgow in his introduction to the book. “Children are ready, willing, and able to master these 400-year-old plays,” Lithgow writes. The second is stated by Ludwig: “To know some Shakespeare gives you a head start in life.” Once you and your children have memorized some Shakespeare, Ludwig maintains, “It will stay with both of you for the rest of your lives. And it will change your lives.”

Ludwig has been teaching Shakespeare to his children since they were six years old, he writes. “It occurred to me when my daughter was in first grade that if there was any skill — any single area of learning and culture — that I could impart to her while we were both healthy and happy and able to share things together in a calm, focused, preteen way, then Shakespeare was it.”

The key to learning Shakespeare was memorization. “In order to memorize something,” he writes, “you have to work slowly and you have to understand every word of what you’re memorizing.” He notes, in passing, that memorizing used to be a standard tool of academic education — children were expected to learn hundreds of lines of poetry, in Greek and Latin and then in their native tongue. “This tradition has faded from our lives,” Ludwig writes, “and something powerful has been lost.” Ludwig’s goal as parent and teacher was to have his son and daughter memorize 25 passages from Shakespeare.

At first sight this goal would seem to be ridiculous. Adults find Shakespeare difficult — how could children cope with the Bard? Fittingly for a how-to book, its author has a few tricks up his sleeve. The first is the use of what he calls “Quotation Pages.” Here Ludwig breaks every passage “into short, logical chunks based on rhythm and meaning,” and then types these chunks on a sheet of typing paper in a large font. (Needless to say, children learn the meaning of unfamiliar words in the passage before tackling these quotation pages.) The next step is for the children to say the lines aloud, assisted by the layout of the quotation page. The third step is for the children to repeat the lines again and again. “The repetition will pay off,” Ludwig insists.

He begins this process with A

Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play

he considers to be, along with Twelfth

Night, the “most child-friendly of all the plays.” In one passage the character Theseus, a bridegroom, complains “But, O, methinks how slow/This old moon wanes!” In order to impress upon his children how the O sound echoes the sense of time dragging along, Ludwig has them exaggerating the sound. “But, Oooo, methinks hoooow slooooow/ This oooold mooooon wanes!”

Ludwig even suggests that the parent make it a contest among the children to see which of them can exaggerate the sound more. “Silly, yes,” he says. “But I doubt that they’ll ever forget the line after this.” In general, Ludwig states, “remember, always, always make the memorization a game for your children. Chest tones, patty-cake, marching, shouting, acting, wearing hats and cloaks, contests, bets, painting on moustaches, bribery by chocolate, whatever it takes.”

Is this really the best way to approach Shakespeare? Ludwig insists that children come to love Shakespeare through memorization, and perhaps only through memorization, and I have no doubt that this is true. Prior to studying any paraphrased content, any search for patterns of imagery, any summation of themes, any tackling of Shakespeare’s famous puns, must come the recognition in Shakespeare of sheer verbal rhythm and sound. even the prose passages in Shakespeare reveal a richness of variable rhythms.

Ludwig of course discusses the verse line known as iambic pentameter, Shakespeare’s line and the standard line of english poetry, and demonstrates how malleable in the hands of Shakespeare this verse form is. Listening carefully to the sound and tempo of this heightened speech is the key to understanding the characters and the plays. Although Ludwig doesn’t mention this, it is also clear that the careful memorization of Shakespeare deepens awareness not only of Shakespeare but of the resources of the english language in general.

In this age of inarticulate adolescents — nay, inarticulate politicians — such awareness surely gives an advantage. Not that we want young people spouting Shakespeare at the slightest provocation — although that might not be such a bad thing — but that children who actually possess Shakespeare in a visceral way through memorization at least know what it is like to employ such poetic speech.

The gist of the book is contained in the first 30 or 40 pages. It may not have been necessary for Ludwig to expand it into book form. Nevertheless it is interesting to see how he approaches a range of Shakespeare plays. In Hamlet, for example, he urges memorization of Polonius’s speech to his son — acknowledging that while Polonius is a windbag, the advice he dispenses is sound. In recently saying farewell to his daughter, going off to college, Ludwig and his daughter exchanged memorized lines from that passage. “As she recited it, I started to cry,” Ludwig recalls. “It was the greatest going away present she could ever have given me.” He hopes that, away at school, she is still following Polonius’s advice.

Critical judgments of the plays inevitably appear, in sweeping fashion. “Comic writing simply does not get any better than this,” he writes of a passage from Twelfth Night. Much Ado About Nothing “is the most surefire comedy Shakespeare ever wrote” — although A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night qualify as “the greatest comedy of all time.” Shakespeare’s Falstaff, meanwhile, is “the greatest comic creation of all time.”

Some negative judgments do appear, although negative only in comparison to the heights of Shakespeare. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, for example, is classed as “the least successful of Shakespeare’s comedies.”

As the quotations above indicate, comedy has a special fascination for Ludwig. He is particularly perceptive in comparing Shakespeare’s comedies, with their hosts of improbabilities, their cross-dressing and their mistaken identities, with some of the best screwball comedies of Hollywood, notably Some Like It Hot. This insight has the reverberant quality of Northrop Frye at his most brilliant. It is no accident that Frye found the clearest examples of his archetypes and symbols in classic comedy. Frye, unfortunately, has been dismissed in academia in recent years and it is good to hear his works cited and his name invoked by Ludwig as a “great literary critic.”

I have one quibble with the book. For some reason, he thinks kids can skip Julius Caesar. “Leave this one to adulthood,” he states. Now it just so happens the first Shakespeare I ever read was Julius Caesar. I must have bought it in the Woolworth’s paperback section — there were no bookstores where we lived — an edition of the play in The Laurel Poetry Series published by dell, one of those 35-cent, slim paperbacks you could easily put into a back pocket. I never spent money better in my life.

I don’t know why I bought it. High school was still a ways off and no one told me I should be reading Shakespeare, and I was not a precocious reader. But the memory of that 35-cent book still charms. It was a nice thing to happen to me, reading the play.

But Ludwig still says leave Julius Caesar to grown-ups, I’m not exactly sure why. But there’s Shakespeare for you. He is inexhaustible not only in himself but in the way he provokes heartfelt and sometimes odd responses.