Hellen Mirren Against Reading Shakespeare in Schools

https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Helen-Mirren-Believes-that-Shakespeare-Should-Not-Be-Taught-in-Schools-20201125

My own school memories (from the 70s/80s) were getting more enjoyment out of watching the films after finishing reading the plays in class... but it's not all about enjoyment then, is it?

I have been saying this for years. I definitely think it has done more harm than good.

Jordan Catalano said: "You know in “Pretty Woman” when Edward takes Vivian to the opera and she asks how she’ll understand it since it’s in Italian and he says -
“You’ll know. Believe me, you’ll understand. The music’s very powerful”.
I feel the same way about Shakespeare. You cant make someone really appreciate it by just reading it, especially someone who won’t understand the words. It needs to be seen to be fully understood and appreciated."

Only problem with the Pretty Woman quote is, it's false. Almost no one just sitting there listing to an opera they know nothing about is going to understand it based on the music. That's why so many people, prior to the advent of supertitles were bored out of their skulls. They were dragged by people who did love and knew opera (or at least wanted to be seen at the opera) and had almost zero idea what was going on.

Mirren's comments were well-stated in that they were purposely vague. I mean, sure, it would be best to see the plays, as they were meant to be seen, not read. Kinda obvious. But is reading Shakespeare in a good class better than seeing Shakespeare in a bad production? Doubtful. Is taking kids to see Shakespeare with no preparation for the plots or Elizabethan language really going to result in instilling a love a Shakespeare? Again, not likely.

Mixed feelings here.

I would agree that for the typical English student, a movie or live production would provide a much more efficient understanding of the text.

That being said, there’s so much historic context and deeper meaning that can be learned from going line-by-line.

Perhaps Shakespeare should be taught as a supplement to an English curriculum, rather than a core feature.

It depends on how and where it's taught.

I spent many years as a teacher and I "moonlighted" as the musical director at our school using a wide variety of MTI materials over the years as well.

I taught a gifted class though and I was expected to expand their learning to include topics and studies that went beyond the curriculum. I was also expected to teach with attention to depth and complexity. I had 5th and 6th graders reading at the high school and even college levels. Maturity-wise would they have been able to understand the Bard in its original text. Maybe to some degree some of them could have, but not entirely.

Still, I took a child's versions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, reconfigured it in to play form and had my kids perform the play on our school's stage. This was when I taught a 4/5 combo. The kids ate it up.

Was it Shakespeare in its original text? No. But they got the idea of who he was. Why he was considered a great writer. What the play was about. And they related to it.

In my post unit exam on the play, and on Shakespeare himself, most of the kids got 100%. Some even came back to me five years later and said they were studying AMND in high school, and while it was challenging to read it in its original form, they already had background knowledge of the play, and who Shakespeare was. This facilitated their understanding of it. Even 5 years later.

I understand what Mirren is saying, but again, it all depends on how you're implementing the study of Shakespeare.

When I learned Shakespeare in school, I found it tedious as long as I tried to pause and look up the footnotes for every word or phrase I didn't understand. But I discovered that if I just read on without worrying about understanding every nuance, I got into the swing of it after a scene or two, and got caught up in the plot machinations etc. While I didn't particularly notice it at the time, I suppose having to do Shakespeare at school did teach me something about approaching 'difficult' content in alternative ways so as to find a way into it.

It was probably ninth grade when my so-called advanced English class started reading Shakespeare. We loved it. Had so much fun with all the famous quotes. For a few weeks after we would go around quoting Shakespeare from out of the blue: “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look, he thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”

We thought this was hilarious and on March 15 we would go around saying “Beware the Ides of March” and our 11th grade English teacher made everyone memorize the tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech from MacBeth. I had already memorized it from the year before when we had first read MacBeth. It was just such a sublime use of the English language.


But when we did go to see a live production of As You Like It at the local college, it was a better and more fulfilling exposure to the man. And I sometimes go back and read specific scenes such as those with Falstaff in Henry IV, but I admit that I have no interest in reading a whole play for pleasure.

@joevitus "It all depends on the student, the environment and a ton of other things." That is unquestionably true as is the notion that not teaching it is an option. I think my point would be that we need a means of teaching it that has as much quality control as possible, and that is demonstrably not achieved by having it taught as literature the way it largely has been by teachers who are not equipped to do anything else.

Leading me to agree fully with trentsketch that "If we're going to teach Shakespeare in school, it has to be absorbed as a performative text (and not performed by the students) before it can be studied as a literary text."

When I was a freshman in high school, my English teacher wanted to work on Shakespeare with us. She decided against starting us off with Romeo and Juliet, simply because she felt that it’s overdone in high schools and wanted to mix things up a bit. So, the first play I worked on/learned about from that class was Merchant of Venice.

While we went around reading the different characters, by virtue of hearing the words spoken, that increased our understanding of what is going on. Also, it lead to some interesting conversations. Such as, was Shakespeare really anti Semitic regarding the character of Shylock. Or, was he just writing about the world around him. And, we also discussed this based on the fact that in the stage directions, for Shylock, his name isn’t mentioned. Instead it said enter Jew, not enter Shylock.

Then, Junior year we worked on Hamlet, and we as a class both found them interesting.

Personally, I think that, specially at the high school level, there are topics that go on in the plays that can lead to great discussion involving critical thinking. And, there are ways for a student to learn that rather than just being able to understand the way Shakespeare wrote. For example, Spark Notes makes books of all Shakespeare’s plays with one page being written out the way it was initially by the Bard, the other, had the text written in modern English.

trentsketch said: "There's a growing movement in American education to reduce the amount of Shakespeare taught in schools. While his work is significant to the literary canon, the language can be so inaccessible that students do not absorb as much knowledge out of it as we'd wish."

I really hope they don't reduce it, but then American schools (even colleges) seem to earnestly want to evolve into trade schools, so I can't say I'm surprised. The idea of teaching beauty and finding the truths meaningful to oneself in works of art and beauty is the least of their concerns.

The language is not inaccessible. It's difficult, which is different. It's highly wrought and makes you reach, as all good poetry does.

How many people ever "absorb as much knowledge" as is contained in Shakespeare's plays "as we'd wish"? That's how you turn art into a test, and rob it of its best qualities.

Updated On: 11/26/20 at 04:46 PM

It doesn't matter whether any play was "written to be read," the fact is what Shakespeare wrote is greater than any production of any of his plays will ever be, and the plays do read extraordinarily well on their own.

"Rhythm, style and how it's staged" are all pretty empty arguments, as we don't remotely stage these works as they were written to be staged, the verbal rhythm of language in Shakespeare's day was closer to the Appalachian Mountains than "proper" mid-Atlantic British, or even the standard American speech of the average U.S. production (although you may be referring to the "correct" rhythm when reading blank verse, though really that's all wrong--the whole point of blank verse was that it mimicked realistic speech better than other forms of verse). You certainly aren't getting Shakespeare's "rhythm, style and how it's staged" from either Laurence Harvey's Romeo or Leonardo DiCaprio's (though they are both good in their very different ways).

Once again, watching a movie or stage production of Shakespeare is great, and I'd encourage it, but I don't think it's inherently any better than a classroom reading or private reading. It just depends on circumstances, and the given student, as well as the given teacher or production or movie. It may, though, be a mistake in that it will seem to force an interpretation on kids rather than letting them figure out for themselves who the characters are or what the works mean. We're all still finding for ourselves what these works mean (that they continue to generate new meaning for us each time we read them is essential to their greatness), and to give students the false idea that there's a set "right" way to interpret the characters of the "meaning" of the works doesn't do the students or Shakespeare much justice.