Shakespeare in schools is more necessary than ever (also Chaucer and Mallory)

This has been demonstrated in any number of “Shakespeare for Kids” offerings from various authors and publishers. In addition, the work of the Shakespeare Schools Festival, which all three of my children attended – with my youngest, ten, played by Macbeth in a real theater last year – highlights how much it can be Shakespeare accessible, bringing the stories to life for elementary school students well before they need to come to terms with “pure” Shakespeare in secondary school.

When I was studying in Australia, Shakespeare’s language was as much as possible imaginable from my “ nasal strayanisms ”, yet I was lucky enough to have a teacher who made the stories dance on the page by comparing them to other things that made them familiar. As teenagers, we could more or less identify with Hamlet’s seething resentment towards his mother and her utter inability to make a decision. We knew well what it meant that parents disapproved of our romantic interests or that someone we liked more like our friend. We knew the guilt, we knew the shame, we knew the evil. You understand the themes and the language fits perfectly.

In any case, the language itself is far more relevant than Mirren attributes it. Much of what we say today is taken directly from Shakespeare, although we don’t always know it. The “green-eyed monster” makes his first appearance in Othello. “All that glitters is not gold,” is a warning in The Merchant of Venice. “A sad sight” has its roots in Macbeth’s blood-soaked hands. Brits are often doomed for their inability to speak other languages, but in their daily interactions they constantly draw on the building blocks of their own language – in expression, proverb, metaphor, imagery and sentence structure.

The recognition of these constituent elements in terms of how language has evolved and what it has preserved since Shakespeare also has a secondary consequence, bridging the gap between contemporary language and older works, such as Chaucer , Mallory, Beowulf, and Piers Plowman – who, like Shakespeare, all use puns and allegorical imagery. Without a first understanding of Shakespeare, these texts will be much more difficult to deal with later in education.