During the twenty-five years I’ve spent directing and producing Shakespeare, the question of “Why Shakespeare?” has always been present, both on the stage and in the classroom. The following is a summary of where I currently stand in this lifelong dialectic.
It starts with my personal story. It is not an exaggeration to say that Shakespeare saved my life. My childhood home was a daily chaos of alcoholic violence, in a run-down, working-class, frightening neighborhood of north London. Nobody cared what I thought, and nobody expected anything of me. But one day, my English teacher came into class and began reciting, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…” I felt that I was awakened from a deep, dreamless sleep. There emerged within me the palpable idea that life could be more than just survival — that it could be a vigorous, imaginative and emotional journey. It changed my path forever. It saved my life. It opened a door to a whole world of possibilities. And I walked through that door. Since then, I have devoted my life to sharing that experience with others. |
So what was it about that speech that changed my life? What is so special about Shakespeare? Why should schools spend precious time and money exposing today’s students to this long-dead author?
Reason 1: There is no teacher like Shakespeare to increase our power of words. And the power of words is the power to express ourselves. And, since we can’t get what we want unless we know how to ask, it is the power to get what we want. The power to cooperate. The power to imagine and to share that imagination. This is education at its most fundamental.
Reason 2: There is another vocabulary that is immeasurably more important. Just as increasing our knowledge of words increases our power to express ourselves, our vocabulary of human behavior increases our power to respond effectively to life’s challenges. It is our wisdom. And the plays of William Shakespeare are an encyclopedic anatomy of human thought and behavior that is without peer in the whole history of the written word. The characters of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and dozens of others have such an archetypal quality that, once you have experienced them, they stay fresh in your mind for life. There is a clarity in Shakespeare’s stories, an unbiased, uncompromised, unconfused understanding. Among the rest of the world’s accumulated treasury of literature, the best of them only ever approach Shakespeare; never match. Reason 3: Shakespeare connects us to the rest of the world. He is the most popular and most studied author not only in the English-speaking world, but in the entire world. Fully half of the world’s children study Shakespeare. So when we study Shakespeare, we are forming a connection — a common bond — with people all over the world. |
Reason 4: Shakespeare wrote his plays over four hundred years ago — before the scientific and industrial revolutions; before “separation of church and state,” in a culture to whom China and America were as distant as the moon is to us. So when we study Shakespeare, we are connecting with our past.
Reason 5: A critically important part of education is to provide students with an opportunity to receive a difficult challenge, use their own energy and ingenuity to meet the challenge (with guidance from the teacher), and be rewarded for it. In a self-reinforcing cycle, each success makes it easier to tackle the next challenge. Conversely, a failure, or worse, to be told, “you can’t” makes it more difficult to tackle the next one. That also, becomes a self-reinforcing cycle, in which each defeat makes it only more difficult to try the next time. Our residencies, tours, and other programs allow teachers to provide a matchless opportunity to their students for a creative success. In the course of a week, two, three or more they take on a very formidable challenge, master it, and succeed. For a student to learn that she can stand in front of her class and perform Shakespeare is an enormously empowering experience. Along the way, their vocabulary, both in words and in patterns of behavior, is deeply enriched. |