To think Shakespeare is boring and crap !

[Lardlizard]

Bloody hate it

I personally think the English curriculum needs to be changed, it focuses too much on Shakespeare and poetry and many children don't understand why there is such a focus on Shakespeare's work in contrast with more modern works

I fully agree. Anything under A level, I think studies of Shakespeare really should be pretty superficial, i.e. who he was, what he did, his influence on the English Language, etc. That doesn't need to be GCSE, it could be done in earlier years. Studying the shit out of Macbeth doesn't achieve proper understanding of the person and his influence, especially for weaker students - it just turns them off.

Similar with poetry really, far too much emphasis on it, especially the sheer stupidity of virtually having to rote learn and fully understand (15?) poems so you can compare one against each other in a closed book exam - just why???

Gove is a knob, I agree. And I'm sorry if you felt me saying acting out Romeo and Juliet doesn't sound fun, was bashing teachers. That wasn't my intention at all. I've just met so many students who hated doing that at school (and many schools absolutely do make students act it out).

If yours love it, clearly you're an excellent teacher and I never meant to imply otherwise.

Old English: Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas.

Shakespeare:Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

Shakespeare is most definitely not Old English!

I wasn't meaning to teacher bash. I enjoyed most of my English lessons, and the Shakespeare teaching was great (we read A Midsummer Night's Dream alongside King of Shadows by Susan Cooper for an example of contextualising). But I think there is a view that Romeo and Juliet or The Tempest are for lower sets (and we were taught them in year 7 and 8) and you need to be able to answer about a 'weighty' play for the highest marks. Which then means you end up studying a set of books that you probably wouldn't choose to read back-to-back.

@Chillipeanuts

YABU. Watch the Hollow Crown. Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III. Spellbinding.

I came on here to say exactly what Chillipeanuts said. I really did not understand Gloucester's 'Now is the winter of our discontent...' soliloquy until I saw and heard Benedict Cumberbatch's rendition. The thing is, Shakespeare's words are not meant to be read but to be heard.

I ADORE Shakespeare. YABVVVVVVVVVU.

My Complete Works is well thumbed and I always find it therapeutic. Murderous Rage? Grief? Love? Silliness? Frustration? Lust? Beauty?

He covered it all. He wrote women exceptionally well, especially given the time period he lived through.

Studying Shakespeare was one of the things that made school worthwhile for me. Yes, people thought I was weird. No, I didn’t give a fuck. I was too mesmerised.

It isn't you specifically sarah, don't worry, but it's the kind of antagonism about the teaching (which also come s up re maths and poetry and anything a bit difficult) and we can get it both barrels : the intellectuals who think we teach it badly, form a place of poor understanding and don't delve,and the other side who think he doesn't deserve to be taught at all! And both sides tend to think English teachers are uniquely shit at teaching Shakespeare.

The English teachers I have observed teaching it badly are often those who weren't taught him much at school and/or didn't do English Lit degrees.

kazzy as it goes, weaker students often like lit far more than you give them credit for.

If I could not teach literature, especially Shakespeare and poetry, I would leave the teaching profession.

user1495884620

Old English: Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas.

There’s an Icelandic letter in there, no? From old Norse?

polkadots it wasn't you either!

I don't like setting and relegating some things to weaker students either : whole other thread! The three texts my GCSE students routinely love are Animal Farm, Christmas Carol and Shakespeare ( usually teach Macbeth or R and J, but also like Taming of the Shrew for the debate!) . They will never remember with either dewy eyed nostalgia or outright despair any language comprehension exercise they have done.

The way Shakespeare is examined at A Level is a bit stultifying and he has been left closed text, which influences student feelings.

It's Beowulf, I believe...

I learnt Anglo Saxon at uni and also did 'The Pearl' which is definitely not fun.

I have experienced, of course, teacher squeezing the joy out of texts : specifically my Middle English supervisor and my 19th century American tutor.

I don't think you teach badly; I don't think Shakespeare is badly taught on the whole. (And god knows I would cringe away from being called an 'intellectual').

But I am a working teacher too. And the way Shakespeare (and other bits of English Lit) are taught at school can sometimes do a disservice to students who want to study those things at university. I don't think this is the fault of teachers. I think it is the fault of a curriculum that has been written by people (like Gove) who have arrogantly decided that they can be specialists without specialist knowledge, and can tell what is important.

It really bugs me, and worries me, that this thread has give us the message, over and over and over, that what's important about Shakespeare is 'his language'. And we should learn 'his contribution to the language'. Either that, or we should read the plays as an opportunity to learn good morals: 'this is racist and Shakespeare shows us how' or 'this is sexist and look how Shakespeare exposes it!'

I get why Gove would want to push a myth of 'English Shakespeare' who 'gave us our language and showed how not to be racist/sexist'. After all, if we're learning lessons about sexism from someone who's been dead four centuries, we're going to feel pretty good about ourselves by contrast. And if we really believe that Shakespeare invented English, then we clearly don't need to acknowledge centuries of European influence and exchange, let alone any debts to the rest of the world.

It's a really disturbing trend. And it's that which makes me uneasy, not any individual teacher or the abilities of people who teach secondary school.

Re. the PP about 'teacher bashing' - that wasn't my intention at all and I'm sorry if that's the way it came across. I'm bashing the politics. Teachers can only work with what's put before them, and the curriculum is dictated at policy level (hence the barmy phonics system is one schools are bound to, whether the teachers happen to approve of it or not).

It's the same as the constant reporting that GCSEs are getting too easy, that improved results are manipulated by dumbing down, and that successive generations of students are getting progressively more stupid. Of course that's ridiculous. It's a failure of policy.

Education is a highly ideological sphere and and it's increasingly used as a political football, with goalposts changing every time a different government comes to power. It's down to teachers to suck up this ridiculous game of patball with themselves as piggy in the middle, and I admire a good many of them for this rather than denigrating them.

I've never met an educator with a good word to say about Gove. He's the most disastrous home secretary in recent memory, and he has stiff competition.

We studied Shakespeare at school from age 11, starting with Midsummer Night's Dream. Did 1 or 2 every year, including A levels. The plays chosen, and how we studied them, changed as we grew older.

I love him. The language is wonderful, plots are great. That doesn't mean I like ALL his plays but you are definitely BU to suggest all ( or the majority) is his work is boring.

Nooo! Wash your mouth out! Pearl not fun?

I love Pearl.

But it is each to their own.

On the subject of the funny letters in Beowulf: it's worth knowing that people contemporary with Shakespeare were still using the letter thorn (þ) to stand for the 'th' sound. It looks like a y by this point, which is why we see 'ye old teashoppe'. It's not 'ye' with a hard 'y,' but 'the'.

By contrast, 'w' didn't get a secure place in the English alphabet until the seventeenth century, as you don't get it in Latin.

Learning pagers of Shakespeare off by heart as a punishment when at school killed any desire to read or see Shakespeare for me (thanks to bullying Susan X, prefect). I spent weeks of lunch breaks being stuck in the library all because of her. She didn’t even attempt to get the right pupil, I was her target. Every. Bloody. Time.
I have hated all poetry and playwrights ever since.

There’s an Icelandic letter in there, no? From old Norse?

No, that's Anglo Saxon. Both this and the old Scandinavian languages are German derivatives and shared many of the same alphabetic characters. The thorn is a fairly common symbol in both.

I was dire at Old English. The problem with the modular system was that it was like learning a whole new language in one brief semester. This earned me my worst university grade ever - the shame!

Yes, it was Beowulf. I understand barely a word of it though!

I definitely did not mean to teacher bash! I'm sorry if it came across like that.
The only reason I mentioned teachers is the boys compare their experience of English with mine. I loved English, my English teacher is spoken of very highly by myself in this household, she was and still is remembered as someone who made learning about Shakespeare very entertaining.
The difference is that in school we focussed on just one piece of Shakespeare's work ( Macbeth) and only during year 10&11 whereas now they start in year 7 and carry on all the way through. Obviously this is not the teachers fault, it is the curriculum they have to follow

The problem with Shakespeare is the way it’s taught in schools, and this has always been the case.

Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed on stage by professional actors who have the skills to bring the stories to life. They were NOT written to be studied in a classroom, which many people will always find dry, incomprehensible and boring. The obsession with studying, rather than enjoying, Shakespeare is the problem, not the plays themselves.

Haven't rtft but OP you probably use phrases from Shakespeare regularly.

Also the sonnets are lovely to read imo.
The Merchant of Venice is my favourite Shakespearean play.

I agree with everything you have both just said sarah and marie and am enjoying this debate.

The mistake I made with the Pearl was translating it... and I never did that with the German Lit texts I studied so not sure why I did it with The Pearl. The rest of Anglo Saxon I loved, more for the fun of learning new stuff.

Shakespeare should never be set as a punishment! Naughty prefect. My ex headteacher had me down as a troublemaker the minute I protested against his punishment of getting students o write pages forma dictionary. he couldn't see my pov that dictionaries are amazing treasuries of wondrous things.

Sarah , did you and I once converse about Sid Bradley??

Certainly not my cup of tea but YABU to call it crap!

I'm enjoying it too.

And yes, I was trying to remember what we'd chatted about before, because I know we have, but couldn't remember! Thank you.

Yes, I can agree with those citing the way Shakespeare is taught to children as being a significant part of why I found it insufferably boring. The same with poetry. It got to the stage where I used to truant every Friday afternoon simply to avoid English Lit, and the teacher was well aware and never challenged me because he realised it was a waste of both of our time to force me to sit through it.

To be honest, I'm still not sure why Lit is/was a compulsory part of the curriculum. I could read perfectly competently before leaving primary school, so why I was forced to sit through a subject I loathed at 15 and 16 I really have no idea. I loved PE and sports, yet the kids who detested that and made no effort at all were never given a hard time in the way that I was by the head of English.

Meh there's lots of things I think are boring and crap and can't for the life of me understand how people like... love island, antiques roadshow, 'celebrity' big brother etc

I like Shakespeare though. Each to their own j guess, it's all subjective. There must be something not crap about it for people to still pay to see it all these years later