Teaching Reading Shakespeare

John Haddon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135266646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teaching Reading Shakespeare is warmly and clearly communicated, and gives ownership of ideas and activities to teachers by open and explicit discussion. John Haddon creates a strong sense of community with teachers, raising many significant and difficult issues, and performing a vital and timely service in doing so.

- Simon Thomson, Globe Education, Shakespeare's Globe

John Haddon offers creative, systematic and challenging approaches which don't bypass the text but engage children with it. He analyses difficulty rather than ignoring it, marrying his own academic understanding with real sensitivity to the pupils' reactions, and providing practical solutions.

- Trevor Wright, Senior Lecturer in Secondary English, University of Worcester, and author of 'How to be a Brilliant English Teacher', also by Routledge.

Teaching Reading Shakespeare is for all training and practising secondary teachers who want to help their classes overcome the very real difficulties they experience when they have to 'do' Shakespeare.

Providing a practical and critical discussion of the ways in which Shakespeare's plays present problems to the young reader, the book considers how these difficulties might be overcome. It provides guidance on:

• confronting language difficulties, including 'old words', meaning, grammar, rhetoric and allusion;
• reading the plays as scripts for performance at Key Stage 3 and beyond;
• using conversation analysis in helping to read and teach Shakespeare;
• reading the plays in contextual, interpretive and linguistic frameworks required by examinations at GCSE and A Level.

At once practical and principled, analytical and anecdotal, drawing on a wide range of critical reading and many examples of classroom encounters between Shakespeare and young readers, Teaching Reading Shakespeare encourages teachers to develop a more informed, reflective and exploratory approach to Shakespeare in schools.

Part I
Language

Chapter 1
Admitting the difficulty

In the 1960s Frank Whitehead posed a question about Shakespeare in secondary schools that continues to deserve consideration: ‘how many of his plays … really come within the linguistic and emotional range of the young adolescent?’¹ While we may feel inclined to retort that education requires us to extend the linguistic and emotional range of our pupils and students precisely by introducing them to texts that lie beyond their present range, or that develop areas of their present intuitions, his question has a real point and should not be evaded. If the text lies too far beyond the linguistic and emotional range of our pupils and students, the connection necessary for development is unlikely to take place. Leaving aside how far ‘linguistic’ and ‘emotional’ range can be separated, I want to concentrate in this first chapter on the questions raised for teachers and their classes by the difficulties of Shakespeare’s language.

Whatever the difficulties secondary school pupils experience with Shakespeare’s language, it is still recognizably continuous with and related to the language that they and their teachers speak. Indeed this is one of the things that we should want to insist on. We should always bear in mind that Eliot’s dictum that all genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood might be true. It is possible, even probable, that Shakespeare’s language grips at first in particular phrases or passages, sensed as somehow fine or mysterious, or as striking a chord with an individual’s feelings or preoccupations (even if, as well may be the case, the words have been misunderstood). It might even be argued that, the story and the dramatic situation having been clearly established, we should to a large extent leave the language to take care of itself. There is a ‘never explain’ strand in some of the Shakespeare teaching of recent years; however, for all my reservation about some glosses, paraphrases and explanations (see below), I don’t feel able to belong to it. Quite apart from any other consideration, pupils are going to face exams on Shakespeare, and we need to take seriously the panic that they feel at times and that tells them that they don’t understand anything of Shakespeare’s language (when actually they understand quite a lot), and which inhibits them and curtails their interest. As with so much in teaching – as I find myself saying again and again in this book – what to explain, how to explain and when are all matters of the teacher’s judgement, and beyond a certain point general principles may not be very helpful. It may be, to quote Eliot again, that there is no method other than to be very intelligent. The intelligence will be at work in the judgement and choices made, both in preparation and in the classroom, about what approaches to use when, what to focus on, what to omit.

Over the last twenty years or so there has also been a healthy classroom emphasis on the physicality of Shakespeare’s language and the importance of getting it onto pupils’ tongues as soon as possible. Pupils have been invited to focus on short passages, phrases, even individual words; to realize them in action, play with them, combine them with bodily action, to hurl insults, to use a particular phrase from Shakespeare to say ‘hello’ or ‘I don’t trust you’ and so on, to speak the words aggressively, kindly, swiftly, etc. While these approaches can be great fun and certainly disarm some of our pupils’ hostility to Shakespeare, there is a tendency to use them without complementary attention to meaning, which tends to be neglected because it is difficult.

The determined optimism which has rightly driven much of our work over the last twenty years or so, insisting on Shakespeare’s accessibility and immediacy, may well have led us to minimize some real impediments to an adequate grasp of Shakespeare. We can be too sanguine about the difficulty of Shakespeare’s language for our pupils (even for ourselves). Much of his language is, in all conscience, very (sometimes astonishingly) difficult. Confronted with the text of a Shakespeare play, the sheer amount of what is unfamiliar can lead to the feeling of not understanding the text at all. Pupils will often say when asked what in particular they don’t understand: ‘Any of it!’ When bafflement turns to indifference and hostility, our troubles begin.

It’s the difficulty with language – among other factors – that has led to various strategies of delaying or minimizing encounters with it. But it’s worth dwelling on what is found difficult and why, and how (at least some of) the difficulties might be met in our planning and teaching.

What pupils find difficult may not always be something we can anticipate. Some years ago, having set groups of Year 9 to work on staging the sleepwalking scene from Macbeth, I went round them for the usual reasons – to nudge, prompt, explain, check that they were actually doing anything. Arriving at one group I was dismayed to find that they were completely stuck, had been unable even to get started. ‘I don’t get it,’ said a particularly able girl, to my confusion, ‘is she in a wheelchair or something?’ When I announced my confusion, she pointed to the line, in the very first speech of the scene: ‘When was it she last walk’d?’

Such unforeseeables aside, it is reasonable to anticipate that difficulties with Shakespeare’s language will be encountered at the levels of lexis, syntax and discourse organization, with other elements of difficulty being metaphor, allusion and cultural references. Often they will be encountered all together, which makes knowing where to focus our helpful attention difficult. However, for purposes of exposition there is some advantage in considering, as far as is practicable, each level separately, and examining the kinds of problems they present and how we may help our pupils with them as they learn to read Shakespeare. Many teachers’ familiarity with early modern English lexis and grammar may well not extend much beyond the knowledge acquired when reading particular Shakespeare plays, and may therefore be in need of enlargement and some degree of organization. In order to write this section I have had to refer to some of the several books that are available on the subject, which are largely written for readers and students of more advanced years and experience than those that secondary school teachers work with. What I try to do in the following chapters is, drawing on my own experience of teaching and reading Shakespeare and referring to some of these works, particularly Charles Barber’s Early Modern English² and N. F. Blake’s Shakespeare’s Language: An Introduction,³ to work out some observations that may help teachers to be clear about which types of difficulty (usually in combination) are likely to be experienced with particular passages. What’s offered in the following chapters is not a programme, to be worked through with classes, but some resources to help develop our sympathy with and understanding of our pupils’ and students’ difficulties, so that we can anticipate questions, make the helpful move without fuss, or make use of an appropriate exercise.

Chapter 2
‘All these old words’

Pupils will tell us that Shakespeare wrote in ‘Old English’ and that he is therefore very hard, if not impossible, to read. They may well add that he also wrote about ‘old stuff’, and therefore is of no relevance or interest, so the struggle with the language isn’t worth the trouble. The short answer, I suppose is: ‘What – old stuff like love, death, mystery, treachery, loyalty, honour, anger, happiness, loss and gain, appearance and reality, murderers, ghosts, liars, lovers, wars, shipwrecks, fathers and daughters, rape, magic, courage, politics, etc.; which of these can’t we be interested in the twenty-first century?’ As to Old English, it’s worth showing them some, for instance a version of the Lord’s Prayer, so that they can see the difference:

Fæder ure þuþe eart on heofonum,

Siþin nama gehalgod.

To becume þin rice

gewurþe ð in willa, on eorð an swa swa on heofonum.

urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg,

and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum.

and ne gelæd þu us on costnumge, ac alys us of yfele. soþlice.

Old English really does pose problems that at first glance seem completely impenetrable: there are letters they may not have seen before, words that look utterly unfamiliar. A little close probing throws up a few likely identifications (or guesses), but on the whole the passage is unreadable without special training.

By contrast an Early Modern English version leaps into focus:

Our Father which art in heauen, hallowed be thy Name.

Thy kingdome come. Thy will be done euen in earth, as it is in heauen.

Giue vs this day our daily bread.

And forgiue vs our debts, as we also forgiue our debters.

And lead vs not into tentation, but deliuer vs from euill: for thine is the kingdome, and the power, and the glory for euer. Amen.

Of course there remain some difficulties (partly orthographical, and we can remove those easily enough, as they are removed in most modern Shakespeare editions). But we can encourage our pupils to see a continuity between Early Modern English and their own.

When asked ‘What do you mean by “all these old words”?’ pupils will often cite ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ as typical sources of difficulty. Since these are just the subject and object of ‘you’ in the singular, the real problems with them are probably grammatical rather than lexical, as in agreement they are found in conjunction with earlier (and therefore unfamiliar) verb forms.

These can, however, be simply taught – and then perhaps reinforced by a lesson in which they are to be used by teachers and pupils instead of ‘you’, etc. (‘Sir, thou shouldst not set us homework, thou settedst it on Monday already.’ ‘Why thou art right, Colin. But thou art out of luck; this week thou hast two homeworks.’)

Of more interest is the use of these terms in relation to social and personal relationships. In Early Modern English, ‘you’ is what the linguists call the unmarked form (the usual form that does not draw attention to itself), likely to be used between social equals; ‘thou’ the marked (standing out on some way from the more ordinary). The marked ‘thou’ can work in one of two ways – it can suggest intimacy (as between close friends or lovers) or condescension (as in talking down to inferiors). There’s some useful material on ‘thou’ in Barber,¹ which pursues the distinction as late as Restoration comedy, and in Sylvia Adamson’s essay ‘Understanding Shakespeare’s grammar: studies in short words’,² which is particularly good on the social and dramatic nuances created by shifts of usage and how interpretation of these is not always straightforward. Her discussion of the opening of Measure for Measure is particularly interesting. It’s worth noting that while the you/thou distinction is lost to us in our everyday contemporary English, it is still very much alive in other languages³ which some pupils in multi-cultural classrooms may well be familiar with.

Romeo and Juliet use ‘thou’ throughout the balcony scene; Friar Lawrence uses ‘thou’ to Romeo and Juliet, presumably as marking his spiritual paternity and pastoral concern; throughout his cruel diatribe against Juliet for refusing to marry Paris, her father addresses her as ‘thou’, presumably not out of affection but marking her as an inferior, totally in his power. An example of the deliberate use of ‘thou’ as provocatively condescending is found in Twelfth Night when Sir Toby is instructing Sir Andrew on how to write a challenge to ‘Cesario’...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• PART 1 Language
• PART II Aspects
• Appendix to Chapter 15: punctuation
• Epilogue: finding value in Shakespeare
• Notes and references