It’s Shakespeare Week: are children well-school’d in the Bard?

By Lyn Gardner for The Guardian‘s Theatre blog, 17 March 2015

How should we introduce children to Shakespeare? I ask because it’s Shakespeare Week in primary schools, a nationwide initiative that aims to introduce the under-11s to the plays of the man who is inevitably dubbed in the online trailers as “the world’s greatest writer”. That always makes me think of Robert Graves’ pithy observation that is always worth requoting: “The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.”

When I was at school in the 70s we were always being told just how good Shakespeare was, but sadly we were presented with very little evidence for this as we spent long, weary afternoons slumped at our desks and reading King Lear and Hamlet out loud, mangling both sense and language. I’m inclined to agree with Mark Rylance,who has argued passionately against making pupils read Shakespeare and testing them on his plays in schools on the grounds that they were supposed to be performed and reading them was “the last thing the author intended”.

Read Full Story

Facebook0Twitter0Google+0Pinterest0Email

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *