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Making Shakespeare Their ‘Buddy’

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Making Shakespeare Their ‘Buddy’ ISSN 2040‐2228 Vol. 4 No. 1 April 2013 Drama Research: international journal of drama in education Article 2 Making Shakespeare their ‘buddy’. Brian Lighthill National Drama Publications www.dramaresearch.co.uk [email protected] www.nationaldrama.org.uk Drama Research Vol. 4 No. 1 April 2013 Making Shakespare their ‘buddy’. (Should Shakespeare studies have a place in the curriculum – or is it just a load of Bardolatry?) ____________________________________________________________________ Brian Lighthill Abstract This article is based on a paper presented by Dr. Brian Lighthill at the RSC Worlds Together symposium, Tate Modern, London. October 7th, 2012 and is a brief summation of four years of observations and action research in one Warwickshire secondary school (2006‐10). The research project explored whether Shakespeare studies should have an ongoing place in the curriculum? In this article I map out the arguments for and against Shakespeare study then describe the modus operandi of the research process. A debate follows on how to make Shakespeare relevant for young learners – if the students are to own Shakespeare’s production can the issues in the fictional stories be made relevant to their real life world? I then summarize the research methodology and case study analysis and, at some length, discuss the discoveries made from many in‐depth interviews and questionnaires with seven randomly selected students, their parents and teachers over four years. Finally I explore the way forward for Shakespeare studies. This paper interrogates two questions: ‘Have Shakespeare’s plays any relevance to the lives of young people today – or is it just a load of Bardolatry?’ And, to miss‐quote Monty Pythons The Life of Brian, What have Shakespeare studies done for us? Article 2 Making Shakespeare their ‘buddy’ 2 Drama Research Vol. 4 No. 1 April 2013 The Argument This paper will explore a simple question: ‘Have Shakespeare’s plays any relevanceto the lives of young people today – or is it just a load of Bardolatry?’ On one hand, the secular religion (Bloom 1998) of Bardolatry (Felperin 1963) has not been dampened by either feminists perceptions (Davis 2003) or by new‐historicists arguments that Shakespeare had a project to establish an ideological unity (Dollimore and Sinfield 1985a cited in Levin 2003: 57). Neither have Shakespeare enthusiasts been sidetracked by observations on Shakespeare’s strategy of power relations in the comedies of A Midsummer Nights Dream (Kavanagh 1985) nor been deflected by analysis of Shakespeare’s religious bigotry in The Merchant of Venice (Sundelson 1983 cited in Levin 2003). And though Dobson (1994: 231‐32) persuasively argued that Bardolatrists simply suppress critical analysis, …the fashion of gulping down every drop of Shakespeare (with or without any reservations about the cultural filtration mechanisms by which it has reached us) is too deeply ingrained in dull commentators and foolish admirers alike students continue to be compelled to study Shakespeare’s plays despite his being, as Diment (2003: 17) wrote, a Dead White English Male who is forcibly and creakingly resurrected from an age so remote to theirs that they feel they have little connection with either it or the man who lived in it. On the other hand, Members of Parliament, pedagogues and the public seem determined to maintain Shakespeare’s most‐favoured‐author status – the study of Shakespeare in the National Curriculum is deemed important because of its intrinsic moral worth and the universal values it espouses. As Bloom (1998: xvii‐xviii) evangelically wrote: Bardolatry, the worship of Shakespeare, ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is. The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. In a slightly less zealous vein, Neelands (2004) advocates that the relevance of Shakespeare’s plays can be demonstrated by drawing on the embedded issues in symbiotic parallel with the social realm – and therefore a humanistic and liberal transdisciplinary approach to Shakespeare study has epistemological justification because three subjects on the school syllabus – Citizenship; Personal, Social, Health and Finance Education; and Shakespeare study ‐have overlapping topics which need to be explored. Article 2 Making Shakespeare their ‘buddy’ 3 Drama Research Vol. 4 No. 1 April 2013 So, how to bring Shakespeare’s relevance to the fore became the hub of my research – for, in this era of Education by Numbers (Mansell 2007) – students inevitably note: You don’t get told what you’re supposed to learn from Shakespeare… (Year 9 Interviews cited in Diment 2003: 20.) Neelands (2004) argues that a cross‐disciplinary approach to Shakespeare study seems an appropriate way forward because it moves learning away from pedagogy based on knowledge‐transfer (Freire 1985) and towards transformational‐ knowledge. However, Whiteheads (1996: 145) apposite question, How many of Shakespeare’s plays really come within the linguistic and emotional range of the young adolescent? goes to the heart of any exploration on perpetuating Shakespeare study. I argue that it is not a good enough reason for the perpetuation of Shakespeare studies to say, We study Shakespeare because he is a literary icon. Students today have little enthusiasm for icons of British social and cultural history. Such icons have little relevance to students. Their icons are living celebrities, not objects in a glass case which, as Skrebels (1997: 83) wrote, as beautiful and valuable as they may be, are still debris from the past, …in preserving them we render them fixed and lifeless, and leave to chance the possible impact they may have on people’s lives. So the syllabus, as‐is, might actually be turning students off Shakespeare appreciation rather than turning them on. One can surmise that despite the creative work in English and Drama classes done by many teachers – inspired by those Shakespeare innovators, Allen, Berry and Gibson – the prevailing mood amongst most students still remains that, …although I know nothing about Shakespeare, I know he’s boring. (11 year old student quoted in Allen 1991: 41.) The challenge is to make the fictional world in Shakespeare’s plays relevant to the students real life‐world. Gibson (1994: 141) argued that Shakespeare’s stories have the ability to model for students both negative and positive ways to be a member of a community by offering them an inexhaustible resource of alternatives of what it is to be human, and what societies are or might be. Gibson (1994: 14) also noted that because Shakespeare opened up the possibilities of other ways of living, other sets of values and beliefs and other ways of defining oneself, his body of work constitutes available sociological and psychological case Article 2 Making Shakespeare their ‘buddy’ 4 Drama Research Vol. 4 No. 1 April 2013 studies for students to analyse forensically like a detective (Gilmore 1996: 79). And Shakespeare’s humanity, with its illusive quality of never being consistent, does provide a fertile model for exploration of human conduct – particularly with reference to the characters often being agents of their own destinies (Gibson 1994). I have argued, in a previous article in Drama: National Dramas Journal of Professional Practice (Lighthill 2009: 26), that no other writer has so successfully advocated the maxim that Truth is not singular – and that this concept is reflected in the validity of the many issues explored in Shakespeare’s plays. Wittgenstein (cited in Bate 1997: 328) encapsulated this idea when he wrote about the Gestalt drawing by Jastrow (1899) which depicts both a duck and a rabbit: Figure 1: Duck‐rabbit ambiguous image This is a drawing of a duck. This is a drawing of a rabbit. Now you see a duck; now you see a rabbit (Ibid.) How frustrating, how exciting – and how stimulating that is. Neither the duck nor the rabbit can be seen at the same time – yet both realities are true. And Shakespeare’s plays exemplify that truth is not singular – nothing is what it seems – as illustrated by Bottoms dream; Romeo, Juliet and Hermias idealistic love; and, of course – the Witches prophecies. As one student I was working with noted, ‘…like my friends give me advice on how to win an argument between my sister and me. Like what to say and stuff, which gets me into more trouble. And the Witches sort of got Macbeth into trouble because he then killed the King. So that links me and Shakespeare together.’ (2010 Y9 student: Interview) During my three years of action research – which was designed both as a prequel to Shakespearean text analysis in English lessons and a stimulus for personal and social development (Lighthill, 2008, pp.21‐26) – I discovered that through Socratic discussions (Nelson, 1965) on the journey the Shakespearean characters take, students can vicariously explore the various courses of action which could have been taken. In other words: students learn from the characters’ mistakes; give advice to the characters; and come to decisions on what they (the students) would have done in similar circumstances. Article 2 Making Shakespeare their ‘buddy’ 5 Drama Research Vol. 4 No. 1 April 2013 And this ability to philosophise on teacher‐set conundrums – which are based on the issues being explored in Shakespeare’s stories – took place during small group discussions and whole year sharing (Lighthill 2008a). And throughout this process the students gained deep learning on how relevant the issues embedded in Shakespeare’s stories are to their lives‐ and how they would/could react to similar slings and arrows (Hamlet: III.I. 72) which life might throw at them (Lighthill 2009). As the Head of English at my Host School said about this transdisciplinary approach to Shakespeare study + Personal and Social Development: ‘There was no sense of reverence about it, there was no sense of blow the dust off this old book – it was that Shakespeare is relevant to their lives and personal and social development – so then doing it in English wasn’t a problem.
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