Teaching Shakespeare in Primary Schools

All the World's a Stage

Stefan Kucharczyk, Maureen Kucharczyk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367903503
• eBook ISBN: 9781000449662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Teaching Shakespeare in Primary Schools offers guidance and practical ideas for teaching Shakespeare's plays across Key Stage 1 and 2. It demonstrates how the plays can engage young readers in exciting, immersive and fun literacy lessons and illustrates how the powerful themes, iconic characters and rich language remain relevant today.

Part 1 explores the place of classic texts in modern classrooms – how teachers can invite children to make meaning from Shakespeare's words – and considers key issues such as gender and race, and embraces modern technology and digital storytelling. Part 2 presents Shakespeare's plays: The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth and The Winter's Tale. For each play, there is a suggested sequence of activities that will guide teachers through the process of inspiring children, incubating ideas and making connections all before responding to it through drama, writing and other subjects.

You don't need to be an actor, a scholar or even an extrovert to get the best out of Shakespeare! Written by experienced teachers, this book is an essential resource for teachers of all levels of experience who want to teach creative, engaging and memorable lessons.

Part 1
Shakespeare and 21st-century education

1
Why teach Shakespeare?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003023944-3

In a sketch from a 1999 TV special of the historical comedy Blackadder, time-travelling butler Edmund Blackadder accidently collides with a man carrying a sheaf of papers. As the man falls to the ground, Blackadder realises that this is none other than William Shakespeare. Blackadder then does two things. He asks for his signature, then punches him in the mouth. “That’s for every schoolboy and schoolgirl for the next four hundred years!” he says. “Have you any idea of the suffering you’re going to cause!” (Blackadder: Back & Forth, 1999)

This moment captures perfectly the relationship we have with Shakespeare today. His face, as captured in the Droeshout engraving, is instantly recognisable (Figure 1.1). He is famous enough for us to want his signature – or at least buy copies of his plays, tickets to the theatre, to name-check him in ‘before-you-die’ reading bucket lists – but we also recognise him as a literary torturer who may have ended our love of drama and theatre before it had even begun.

Figure 1.1 A portrait of William Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout (1623) used on the cover of the first printed collection of his plays, the First Folio.

Many books on this subject begin with a chapter about why we should teach Shakespeare. As you will have noticed, so does this one. But while these books are insightful and relevant, many of them start with the basic assumption that you already are convinced of Shakespeare’s brilliance. There is a logic to this of course: why would you be holding such a book if it were otherwise? If you are someone with a background in the theatre, or have a passion for literature or performance art, then it is easy to imagine your answer as a resounding cry of “Verily! Bring forth the Bard!” If, on the other hand, your abiding memories of studying, performing or watching Shakespeare’s plays are ones of confusion, boredom or embarrassment, then it would be quite understandable if you need more convincing. While we are not shy to share our love of Shakespeare’s work, as we will do throughout this book, we are cautiously aware that other people’s relationship with Shakespeare could politely be called ‘complex’.

So, in this book, we won’t presume you are a prior convert, and we make no apologies for this. Yes, you may have come to the idea of teaching Shakespeare willingly, but equally you may be taking the long way around. Either way, we intend to begin by outlining some of the reasons of why teaching Shakespeare is worth it.

The ‘problem’ with the classics

Shakespeare: classic. Those two words, seemingly inseparable, explain both the appeal and the ‘problem’ with reading, performing and teaching Shakespeare. Since the 19th century, Shakespeare’s status has been elevated from that of famous playwright – a status achieved in his day – to the pinnacle of British (or rather, English) literary achievement. He is a genius, the view goes, with a legacy to be admired by all, a bust on the professor’s desk. It is the same thinking that has continued to make Shakespeare a staple of school and university curricula both in Britain and around the world. It is the same thinking that saw English Victorian colonialist adventurers such as Henry Morton Stanley and John Hanning Speke travel across the African interior with a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works tucked into their saddle bags. Like the wizard Prospero in The Tempest trying to educate and civilise the island native Caliban, Shakespeare represented the lamp of civilisation, of beauty carried into the darkness (Wilson-Lee, 2016).

It is this civilising, or culturing, appeal that makes Shakespeare and other ‘classic’ texts attractive to educational reformers. Indeed, over the last ten years, reforms of primary education in England have witnessed a renewed determination that children study ‘quality’ texts with a specific focus on appreciating Britain’s “rich and varied literary heritage” (DfE, 2013, p. 13). This has meant a return to classrooms for Shakespeare alongside others in this category: Little Women, The Secret Garden, Black Beauty, Beowulf and others. This goes hand in hand with Ofsted’s revised School Inspection Handbook, which controversially prioritises ‘cultural capital’ (Ofsted, 2019, p. 43), a move designed to expose disadvantaged children to cultural knowledge deemed important. It is a move its critics have dismissed as an attempt to embed an elitist interpretation of what quality in culture looks like, alienating the very groups it is intended to help (Mansell, 2019).

While good teachers have always sought to offer children quality literature, the mood of this reform is part of a larger shift to promote British culture and intellectual achievement. Since 2014, schools in England are required to promote what the UK government Department for Education calls “fundamental British values” (DfE, 2013), intended to tighten up the standards on spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils to embed a sense of national identity in order to ward off Islamic extremism. In this context, Shakespeare is appealing to schools as it can satisfy both the need for ‘quality’ and ‘Britishness’. Yet, this misappropriation of British cultural symbols to stand for harder to define values is not always a comfortable fit (Hunter-Henin and Vincent, 2018). We are not in any way suggesting that Shakespeare’s legacy as an English writer should not inspire pride in children, but simply to recognise the way Shakespeare is used, often inappropriately, as a powerful brand used to stand for and promote a vague sense of an ‘authentic’ British identity (this is just as popular outside the UK where Shakespeare remains a mark of sophistication, high education and ambition, especially in former British territories).

The inconvenient truth is that Shakespeare wrote not for posterity, but for ordinary people; not for longevity, but in order to put food on the table and make his living. Although the elite of Elizabethan and Jacobean London certainly enjoyed his plays and patronised his theatre company, Shakespeare’s plays were mass popular entertainment enjoyed by people of all classes. Yet, in the 21st century, the imperative to teach Shakespeare still too often comes from this place of aspiration. The plays of Mr William Shakespeare are accepted as a byword for ‘quality’, like a literary gold standard – which they are, but as we will explore in this book, perhaps not for the reasons some might imagine.

While we wholeheartedly celebrate children reading a range of interesting and rich texts both for pleasure and learning, aspiration is the wrong reason to study Shakespeare. Separating out literature into ‘classics’ and ‘fripperies’, dividing the canonical texts from the comics, the ‘must-reads’ and ‘never-agains’ is at cross-purposes with what it means to be a reader. Readers, especially young ones, are poorly served by learning to see literature as a hierarchy with comic books at the bottom and the pantheon of classics at the top. Instead, we feel passionately that literature should be presented to children as something to be enjoyed, to be actively engaged with, and a route to further curiosities. And that, perhaps surprisingly, is how we see Shakespeare fitting in best of all.

Why study Shakespeare?

As we will explore throughout this book, it is not the man, the myth, the legend – the Shakespeare – that matters. As we know from personal experience, when unquestioning deference is the starting point, studying Shakespeare can be a confusing, complicated and bewildering task. We have worked hard to avoid this, to blow the proverbial cobwebs off the Shakespeare statue in order to make it a living, breathing experience for children.

The lineage of stories

Although Shakespeare was writing 400 years ago, it is wrong to think of his writing marooned in the past. Instead, we should think of him as part of the evolving lineage of stories – a literary bloodline that continues to the present. This is important because it also reveals how Shakespeare himself wrote. Many of his plays borrowed heavily from existing stories; some were simply updated versions. Macbeth was drawn from Raphael Holinshed’s 1587 page-turner Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland; Romeo and Juliet was lifted from Arthur Brooke’s 1562 poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, itself a translation of an earlier work. But the borrowing didn’t stop when Shakespeare died: the DNA of many of his stories has found its way into modern films, books and television programmes. The Lion King, for example, is a reworking of Hamlet; its sequel The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride leans heavily on Romeo and Juliet. There are references to Shakespeare in SpongeBob Square Pants, The Simpsons and Toy Story 3. Even sci-fi blockbuster Star Wars with its secret twins (Twelfth Night), informative ghosts (Hamlet), fallen tyrants (Julius Caesar, Macbeth) and hidden lovers (Romeo and Juliet) owes a debt to Shakespeare’s works.

While Shakespeare was not shy to plunder works by other authors for good material, his versions are somewhat definitive: nobody is talking about Matteo Bandello’s original tragic poem of Romeus and Juliet. His gift with language, the iconic set-pieces, the archetypal characters: Shakespeare’s plays are rollicking entertainment. Even contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe or Benjamin Jonson who were prolific and highly respected have not managed to maintain widespread popular appeal. Learning about Shakespeare and his plays is to begin to see how the lineage of stories connects past and present.

Lessons on the human experience

Perhaps what sets Shakespeare apart is how his plays touch on themes so universal that they transcend age, class, time and geography. As we discuss in Chapter 2, he has something to say about our relationships, our feelings, our worries that can still touch us in the 21st century. Michael Rosen recalls a young child once saying they liked how Shakespeare “gets to the big stuff, really quickly” (BBC Teach, 2021). The ‘big stuff’ is death, life, war, rivalry, love and all the rest. As this child understood, Shakespeare shows us that the people of the past laughed, worried, argued and cried about the same things that we do.

As they read Shakespeare, children will meet characters who love and lie, act nobly and cheat, argue and establish firm friendships; many of these characters they will recognise from other stories and, for better or worse, from their own lives. It helps us understand a little better the experience of being a human. As journalist Yuan Yang neatly puts it, “[i]n many classrooms around the world, it is Shakespeare who breaks the bad news” about human failings (Yang, 2018). Perhaps Shakespeare gets his edge by forcing us to be active, to ask questions about why people behave the way they do and, in doing so, how they can tell us something rather interesting about ourselves and what it means to be a person in this world (Smith, 2020).

Playfulness with language

While much is made of Shakespeare’s contribution to the English language in the form of new words coined or quotable lines penned (as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Encountering Shakespeare
• Part 1 Shakespeare and 21st-century education
• Part 2 Teaching Shakespeare
• Appendix: National Curriculum objectives
• Index