From Domestic Didacticism to Compulsory Examination: School Shakespeare from 1850 to the present

Abstract

An interest in the way Shakespeare’s plays are taught in secondary schools today is not confined to a small number of English and Drama teachers in secondary schools, nor are the debates surrounding pedagogy and assessment procedures limited to teachers and parents or education departments, teacher unions and examination boards. The way young people in England, Australia and America experience Shakespeare is of interest to a large number of other people including actors, directors, businessmen and entrepreneurs who often reflect negatively on their own school days. While such reflections aim to encourage teachers and students to supplement their study of Shakespeare with visits to the theatre, they can at times expose a worrying idea that exciting ways of experiencing and interpreting Shakespeare occur outside the classroom and if they happen inside the classroom, it is because films, performances or resources have been brought in from elsewhere. This idea that creative Shakespeare happens outside the classroom is something of a nineteenth-century legacy, an idea forged when a tradition of informal education and domestic instruction combined with an emerging system of public examinations and compulsory schooling.