If we are to believe a recent survey commissioned for the National Year of
Reading, Shakespeare is as appetising to children as cod liver oil or
madrigals. For 11 to 14-year-olds, the celebrity gossip magazine Heat and
the teenage girls' mag Bliss top the polls. Their least favourite reading is
“homework”, closely followed by the dramatist whom I recall being proclaimed
Man of the Millennium in 2000.
So what to do? Dismiss our kiddies as little horrors and leave them to their
computer games and blogs? Most serious theatres fear a future in which their
existing audiences simply aren't replaced. Statistics are hard to come by,
but Shakespeare's Globe, whose open skies doubtless appeal to the young and
adventurous, is unusual or even unique in attracting 50 per cent of its
audiences from the under-34s. Although the Royal Shakespeare Company's total
audience for its “complete works” season at Stratford in 2006-07 was
527,000, just 53,000 bought its £10 tickets for schools and its £5 tickets
for individuals under 25.
Are there ways, then, of showing the young that Shakespeare told terrific
stories, created wonderfully real characters, and treated subjects that have
more to do with their lives than Invasion of the Galactic Goobers? This
week, the RSC is bringing Richard II, the Henry IV plays and Henry V to the
Roundhouse in North London, and a bit later King Lear opens the summer
season at Shakespeare's Globe. How are we to convince our children that they
might find inklings of their own concerns in the bond of Hal and Falstaff,
the derring-do of Henry V or the problems posed by that impossible
grandfather figure, Lear?
The answer can't simply be to put Shakespeare on the national curriculum and
force-feed some exemplary text to 14-year-olds, as the Government decrees.
This will only make the Bard “homework” and ensure that he's one and two on
the pubescent hate-list. Nor is experiencing Shakespeare on the screen or
stage necessarily a helpful introduction, since so many productions are
either stodgy or forbiddingly clever-clever. Recently I asked Tom Stoppard
what he thought of his first sighting of Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier's
film of Hamlet. “It bored me shitless,” he replied succinctly.
It wasn't until he became a journalist in Bristol and saw Peter O'Toole's
Hamlet that he was converted. So if the precocious boy who was to write
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and later Shakespeare in Love once
disliked the national poet, special efforts must be needed to combat
Bardophobia in the average child. And just this year there have been two
very different attempts to confront the problem: a manifesto and programme
called Stand Up for Shakespeare from the RSC and, from Classical Comics, the
first two of a series of Shakespeare plays in pictorial form, Macbeth and
Henry V, as well as free downloads from the company's website of comic-book
versions of Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III and The Tempest, this year's
GCSE set texts.
I'm not naturally sympathetic to attempts to simplify Shakespeare, though here
I'm thinking of those aimed at adults. Take the kind of texts that A.L.
Rowse published in the 1980s. For that tone-deaf professor it was right to
require Hamlet to denounce Claudius's “filthy” instead of “reechy” kisses.
And everywhere Rowse preferred “you” to a “thou” that signals familiarity
and (“Oh, thou vile king!”) sometimes contempt. That's a dumbing down that
panders to the modern refusal to make much intellectual effort. But with
children it is surely different.
Shakespearean comics such as the Japanese-style but English-language Manga
series, with their black-eyed heroes and gorgeously graphic samurai battles,
are, I suppose, the contemporary counterparts of Lamb's Tales from
Shakespeare. Charles and Mary Lamb softened the Bard - the rake Lucio lost
his libido in Measure for Measure and the brothel scenes disappeared from
Pericles - but their clarity and warmth must have readied many children for
Kean, Macready, Irving and, later, Gielgud and Olivier. Similarly, I can
imagine Classical Comics' Henry V and Macbeth preparing our kids for
McKellen, Jacobi and Russell Beale.
What makes these comics unique is that they come in triplicate. All three
volumes have identical pictures, but one contains the complete text, another
a “plain text” and the third still brusquer dialogue. There's obviously a
loss of poetry and, sometimes, meaning here. It's disconcerting to find
Macbeth saying: “I just want to get it OVER with. If only I could KILL him
and GET AWAY with it”, or “DUNCAN's at peace in his GRAVE. We have done him
a FAVOUR”. And when Henry V should be interrupting the Archbishop of
Canterbury's justification of war with France to ask: “May I with right and
conscience make this claim?”, he seems gratuitously callous when he bluntly
substitutes: “You're saying I can claim the THRONE OF FRANCE?”
Still, the gains outweigh the losses if children are drawn into a sometimes
complex plot by succinct, clear language and the terrific cartoons that Jon
Haward has drawn for Macbeth. His green-faced, red-eyed, scrubbily bearded
witches are far nearer the hellish creatures that Shakespeare conceived than
the prancing Glasgow chavs or glum Morningside housewives I've seen in the
theatre. And his Macbeth is as formidable as he should be: a big, grim
warrior who nevertheless sweats and ogles with horror at the spectral dagger
or Banquo's blue, eyeless ghost. Haward has caught the play's terror and
tension a lot better than many productions that I recall.
Nor do the men in charge of our major Shakespearean theatres - Dominic
Dromgoole at the Globe, Michael Boyd, the artistic director of the RSC -
object to comic-book Bard any more than they would to such films as 10
Things I Hate About You, an updating of The Taming of the Shrew, with the
late Heath Ledger as a Petruchio figure called Patrick Verona, or Baz
Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, with Leonardo DiCaprio. No fewer than 250
adaptations of Shakespeare have been seen on the screen over the years, from
Olivier's Henry V to Branagh's As You Like It and Much Ado; but those two
spin-offs were aimed specifically at teens and, perhaps, made Shakespeare
less intimidating and encouraged them to explore him farther.
“Part of the fun is that there are so many ways of exploring him,” Dromgoole
says, “films, radio plays, TV, dance, opera and, yes, cartoons.”
Boyd was put off by a dull Merchant of Venice brought to his primary school
but turned on by a cartoon Hamlet: “The oddness of the language was like the
gothic quality of the drawings and drew me in. And much later one of my
favourite-ever Othellos came as a comic. I'll never forget the close-up it
gave of Desdemona's strawberry-embroidered handkerchief falling. All one's
anxieties about its loss being such a ridiculous coincidence disappeared in
that single, awful, compelling, destiny-loaded frame. It was great.”
Boyd's Hamlet moment came when he was 8, which is also the age at which his
company's new manifesto suggests that children should be introduced to the
dramatist. “At that age they have the playfulness actors try to achieve in
rehearsals,” says Jacqui O'Hanlon, the RSC's acting director of education.
“And they take a delight in learning unusual language, because no one has
told them how difficult it is.”
Boyd agrees, citing his seven-year-old daughter: “One of the pleasures of her
and her contemporaries' lives is bringing new language to the playground.
There's no loss of status in struggling with it, as there is later.”
But the key words in Stand Up for Shakespeare are the first two. The company
offers training and diplomas to actors and teachers and sends its alumni to
classrooms, with the aim of getting children on to their feet and performing
speeches, scenes, even whole Shakespearean plays. Right now 14-year-olds are
tackling Hamlet, ten-year-olds Julius Caesar and, amazingly, eight-year-olds
Richard II.
“If they stand up and do it, and then see it live, they become more confident
people and more sophisticated, happier readers of the text,” O'Hanlon says,
citing a school where pupils' recorded enjoyment of their English lessons
rose from 47 to 98 per cent after they'd been immersed in practical
Shakespeare.
It's an ambitious and potentially fully national scheme, which already
embraces 252 schools from Cornwall to Northumberland and brings a selection
of children to Stratford, lets them work there with actors and directors,
and returns them to their schools to spread the word as “Shakespeare
ambassadors”. And the programme is matched by the Globe, whose 23-person
staff and 60 volunteers offer “Lively Action” workshops to 800 students a
day, as well as courses for teachers, “outreach projects” to schools in
Britain and abroad and even Shakespearean storytelling sessions with
nursery-school children.
The Globe's director of education, Patrick Spottiswoode, is also a great
believer in stand-up Shakespeare. “Too often children are deskbound, reading
rectangular books at rectangular desks in rectangular classrooms,” he says.
“We don't want them nailed to the page but up and playing, if possible on
our own stage. It gives them a tremendous sense of achievement. After all,
Shakespeare is in our DNA and we find they want to feel that. It can be
incredibly empowering.”
Empowering and even inspiring. Again and again O'Hanlon has seen the eyes of
bored-seeming children light up at Shakespeare. In particular, she remembers
a Devon schoolboy, eight-year-old Ben, playing a soldier on Elsinore's
freezing battlements as old Hamlet spookily appeared. “My dad said
Shakespeare was boring, but he's got it wrong,” he said. “I'm going to tell
him about Hamlet. It's got murders and ghosts and castles and that's not
boring. What are we doing next?”
Fine - but, just to end on a sceptical note, will Ben's enthusiasm survive the
deadly Shakespeare that still sometimes stifles our stages and spirits? The
RSC and the Globe's excellent educators and those gifted comic-book
illustrators may give their all. But finally it's up to the actors and
directors to justify and sustain their work.
The comic-book versions of Macbeth and Henry V are available in bookshops now
and from www.classicalcomics.com. Versions of Much Ado About Nothing,
Richard III and The Tempest can also be downloaded free from the site.
Details of the Stand up for Shakespeare campaign from 01789 272520 or
www.rsc.org.uk/standupforshakespeare
A SUMMER OF SHAKESPEARE
The Histories
The RSC runs riot with eight historical dramas - two Henry IVs, one Henry V,
three Henry VIs, Richards II and III - over the next couple of months. And
there are two chances in May to see all eight over two gruelling weekends.
Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 (0844 4828008; www.rsc.org.uk), from
tomorrow A SUMMER OF SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
David Calder takes Lear outdoors for the Globe director Dominic Dromgoole in
the first play of a summer that will also feature A Midsummer Night's Dream,
The Merry Wives of Windsor and Timon of Athens. Shakespeare's Globe,
Bankside, London SE1 (020-7401 9919; www.shakespeares-globe.org)
The Taming of the Shrew
The RSC at Stratford's season has already begun with a flat Merchant of
Venice, but still to come is Shrew, plus A Midsummer Night's Dream
(pictured) and, oh yes, David Tennant's Hamlet. RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon
(0844 8001110; www.rsc.org.uk)
