I was asked to go on breakfast television this week to talk about Shakespeare. Hilary Mantel had been quoted in the Mail on Sunday as saying his plays are “deeply unsuitable as an exam subject for pupils”. Her argument, as I understand it, is that there are no right and wrong answers in Shakespeare, so you can’t really set exams on it.
Fair point, possibly, but if it is not examined at GCSE, no teenager I have ever met is going to bother reading any Shakespeare at all, because it’s, like, hard to understand. But what do I know? I have never been a teacher. So I contacted my English teacher from the class of 1983. Mrs Byford sent me a short essay on WhatsApp, for which I have awarded her top marks.
She taught Shakespeare in comprehensive schools for 39 years, and emphatically believes her charges enjoyed it as much as she did. OK, I thought, perhaps she is a bit old school (no offence, Mrs Byford). So I called a friend of mine who is half her age, a head of department at Arthur Terry, a big, state-funded academy school in Birmingham, and she put the question out on her English teachers’ WhatsApp group.
I expected a bit of, “Oh, yes, it would be nice not to bother with Shakespeare,” but got not a whiff of it. The fervour was striking. Othello’s themes of racial discrimination and jealousy; Romeo and Juliet on gang culture and forbidden love – the list of relevant themes went on and on.
I went to bed fired up on the subject, good and ready to rumble with whomever I was to argue with.
But, then, Good Morning Britain texted at 5am to say there wasn’t room for the item after all. Oh, well, back to sleep then, perchance to dream and all that.
