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2001 .
Shakespeare and Education
Ishrat Lindblad
"In the Company of Shakespeare" - a cultural and educational
project in Stockholm
The aim of this paper is
to present and discuss a unique long-term project to
introduce Shakespeare in English to Swedish schoolchildren
that began tentatively under the leadership of the director
and choreographer, Donya Feuer in September 1990, reached a
climax in 1998 when Stockholm was cultural capital of
Europe, and continues at the present time as a joint project
between the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden
(Dramaten), Kulturhuset in Stockholm and the
Teacher's Training College in Stockholm
(Lärarhögskolan).
In her own account of this project, Donya Feuer traces her
inspiration for it back to the moment of her reading Ted
Hughes's selection of Shakespeare's verse in 1976 combined
with what she describes as a
"startling experience
while improvising in a workshop [in 1989] with two
ten-year olds on 'Take, O take those lips away, That so
sweetly were forsworn': beginning with just the physical
effort of saying the words in English, then over to their
rough Swedish translations, making it then possible to
return to and 'use' the original text. Unforgettable …
Shakespeare, and the voices of those two children" (Feuer,
119).
One of the
results of this "epiphanic" moment was her agreement to
enter into a collaboration with a class of science students
at Brännkyrka high-school (Class N3B) in
response to the suggestion of their English teacher, Ulla
Al-Fakir. The class met at least twice weekly to read,
translate and commit to memory a stanza each in English of
Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. Instead of the
customary special paper this class chose to work on a stage
production in English using selected passages from a variety
of Shakespeare's works. For this purpose they were given
access to a rehearsal studio at Dramaten and had the
added privilege of being able, during the preparatory stages
of their project, to work with an abridged text of A
Midsummer Night's Dream especially edited for them by
Ted Hughes. The resulting production entitled "More Than
Cool Reason ever Comprehends" used a substantial portion of
the text of A Midsummer Night's Dream and was
performed entirely in English to an audience of students,
their parents and their teachers at Kulturhuset (3
performances in 1991) and was subsequently successfully
revived, even though the class had graduated and dispersed,
for 6 more performances during the autumn of 1991 at the
cinema hall of the Modern Museum in Stockholm.
Petter Lille, one of the original group of students, in
writing about this experience some years later, claims that
through their work with Venus and Adonis the students
felt they had absorbed Shakespeare's language "into their
blood" and had not only committed the lines to memory but
truly learnt them "by heart" in the fullest sense of the
words. (Barn och Kultur, no.5, Autumn 1993, 92). In
fact, several of the students, Petter Lille among them,
became so involved with the project that they continued to
work with Donya Feuer for some time, assisting her in
workshops with new groups of students from class eight and
nine who came from some of the secondary schools that had
seen Class N3B's performances at the Modern Museum. This new
group was called "Buketterna" and proved to be quite
longlived. Gradually they developed a special way of working
and improvising around Shakespeare's texts and also visited
a number of different schools in the Stockholm area as
workshop leaders to share their way of working.
On account of the enthusiasm which their contact with
Shakespeare in the original language generated among the
schoolchildren with whom she had come into contact, in 1990
Donya Feuer entered into a joint collaboration between
Dramaten (The Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden),
Kulturhuset (The Culture House) and a large number of
primary, middle and high schools in the Stockholm region in
order to get schoolchildren of all ages to engage with
Shakespeare's texts in English. This project was entitled
"Shakespeare kommer. Kommer Du?" (Shakespeare will
come. Will you?). It set a ball rolling that meant that
either directly through this project or one of its offshoots
by the year 2001 more than seventy schools in greater
Stockholm, 14 in other Swedish cities, and a few schools in
Rumania, Finland, Denmark and even 4 schools New York, U.S.A
had been exposed to Donya Feuer's pedagogic method.
Her method involves the creation of a text that she terms "a
particell" (echoing Mozart's use of the word for his notes
for a "partitur"). The particell is always taken from the
American edition of Ted Hughes's selection entitled The
Essential Shakespeare. One of the key particells is:
"When my cue comes, call me/ And I will answer, I will
answer" (from Bottom's lines in A Midsummer Night's
Dream). Another is " I am not what I am/ I follow but
myself; /Heaven is my judge…/ I am not what I am" (from
Iago's lines in Othello). Students are at first made
to read the lines out loud and then to try and find as many
synonyms in their own language as they possibly can for the
English words. This inevitably makes them aware of the
multiple interpretations a line can have and also of the
nuances of difference in regard to the connotations of
apparently synonymous words. Having experimented with
translation, the next step is to memorise the lines. This is
done playfully by the students together in chorus. Once the
lines have been learnt by heart, the students are divided
into smaller groups and helped to devise their own
performance of the lines they have learnt. They are
encouraged to experiment with a variety of ways of staging
the lines - in chorus, or by repeating the same lines after
each other, or breaking up a lines to be spoken by different
performers. Ultimately they are preparing for a relay
performance based on passages the different groups have
chosen and rehearsed. In this way they not only get to know
a fairly large number of Shakespeare lines by heart, but
also derive the manifold benefits of working as a team to
produce a play; acting different roles, creating their own
interpretations and getting the applause and appreciation of
a sympathetic audience that consists of virtually all the
pupils and their parents and teachers in their respective
schools.
After several years of successful collaboration with
schools, in 1996 Donya Feuer was requested by Bengt
Börjesson, at the time head of the Teacher's Training
College in Stockholm (Lärarhögskolan),
formally to join the staff as a professor in order to
introduce teacher candidates to her method. The idea was
that teachers should learn how to use Shakespeare's language
in workshops as a pedagogic tool in their own future
professional activities. For this purpose "Buketterna"
changed their name to " Will's Company" and joined with the
teacher candidates at Lärarhögskolan who created a
group called "Lärarensemble". In effect "Will's
Company" was "employed" by the Teacher's Training College in
Stockholm in order to work intensively on an ambitious
project with schools sponsored by Dramaten,
Lärarhögskolan, Kulturhuset and
Kulturhuvudstadsåret '98) (the name given to
the company responsible for organizing the activities to be
performed in Stockholm during the year 1998 when it was
cultural capital Europe). The immediate goal was a series of
relay performances in English of Shakespeare at
Kulturhuset throughout the year 1998. This was
successfully accomplished when as many as 8000 students from
Stockholm, some other parts of Sweden and a few from other
countries as well, prepared and presented a number of
different events based on Shakespeare's texts. The year was
officially inaugurated with a performance at Dramaten
(The Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden) in January, followed
by relay performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The
Tempest, and As You Like It through January,
February, April, September and December at
Kulturhuset and other venues. Among a host of
activities, performances of Shakespeare in English were
given during Stockholm University's "Science week", during
the National Conference for teachers of Modern Languages,
and at the Fifth Nordic Teacher's Conference at
Lärarhögskolan.
Largely because of the success of the abovementioned project
in Stockholm, in 2001 the government allocated a fresh grant
to sponsor a project to be called "In the Company of
Shakespeare" in order spread the idea to other Teacher
Training Colleges in the country. In close collaboration
with Lena Tidholm, the acting head of
Lärarhögskolan in Stockholm, all the
Teacher Training Colleges in Sweden have been invited to
send two or three teacher candidates and one tutor
responsible for their training to participate in a series of
workshops called "Bottom's Dream" at Dramaten. These
workshops are personally supervised by Donya Feuer and her
core group of workshop leaders. At the present moment their
goal is to produce a relay performance of The Tempest
at Kulturhuset in April 2002 with the participation
of about 150 teacher-candidates from throughout the country.
This performance will be dedicated to the memory of Ted
Hughes. In the long-term however, their goal is no less than
to inspire teachers throughout the country to introduce
Shakespeare in English to schoolchildren from the primary to
the high-school level. In the fall of 2002 all the teachers
within the network intend to intiate this process in at
least 150 different classrooms, by repeating on the he same
day at the same time the particell that has become their
hallmark: "When my cue comes, call me / And I will answer, /
I will answer." It is indeed difficult to find a comparable
example of an educational dramatic project on such a large
scale.
In his report to the Ministry of Education dated March 1,
1999, Bengt Börjesson claims that the "Shakespeare
project" is a linguistic rather than a dramatic one and that
its ultimate aim is to help young people to develop their
own linguistic and creative ability. Although it is
difficult to measure the impact of such education in
quantitative terms it is worth noting that in the decade
since this project was initiated, about twenty-two thousand
Swedish schoolchildren of all ages have been brought into
direct contact with Shakespeare's texts.
Reports by three teachers at the primary, middle and high
school levels all testify to the success of bringing
Shakespeare's texts in English into the classroom. Lotta
Harding of Ålstensskolan describes how children
in class 2 (aged eight) respond to the energy and rhythm of
Shakespeare's original language. She encourages them to play
with the few lines they are to learn by heart by speaking in
chorus, in pairs, as individuals, and also to hear the
rhythm by stamping their feet or clapping their hands, thus
letting the language enter their bodies as well as their
minds. (Barn och Kultur, 93) She tells how the
primary schoolchildren she had worked with through the term
were then taken to Dramaten to see "Bottom's Dream"
(a collage of Shakespeare's texts based on Ted Hughes's
selection and performed principally by "Buketterna"). They
remained silent and were clearly fascinated throughout the
performance. Afterwards they too were divided into groups of
roughly ten each and allowed to rehearse a few lines of
Shakespeare together for a quarter of an hour and then given
the opportunity to perform their lines for each other with
great success.
Similarly reporting on her experience of teaching
Shakespeare's texts in English every year for three years to
children in Class 6 (about 12 years of age), Eva Edman of
Mälarhöjdens school claims that she finds
students develop their own ability to express themselves
both linguistically and emotionally through the stimulation
that the contact with this work affords them (Barn och
Kultur, 95). Marie Linder and Christina Holmqvist of
Österholms high-school also testify to the
positive response they get from their adolescent students (a
group often known to be noisy and "difficult" at high
schools) especially when introduced to Shakespeare's love
poetry and the complexities of his treatment of young love
in A Midsummer Night's Dream. (Barn och
Kultur, 97).
Apart from the number of extremely positive evaluations by
school-teachers on record in the project's archives at
Dramaten, one of the schools in Stockholm,
Högalidskolan, which by no means represents an
elite neighbourhood has chosen to profile itself as a
"Shakespeare school", consistently using his texts in a
remarkable number of different subjects and innovative ways.
One such example is the use of lines from Shakespeare's
plays as the source of inspiration for art classes which
culminated in an impressive exhibition of students'
work.
According to Bengt Börjesson's report to the Ministry
of Education dated March 1, 1999 the fact that the project
includes a large variety of different kinds of schools means
that students of different social backgrounds are reached by
it. Frequently those who become most enthusiastic about the
work are immigrant students with a poor knowledge of
Swedish, or else students who may be native speakers of
Swedish, but possess poor language skills. Learning
Shakespeare's lines by heart in English and rehearsing them
together has clearly facilitated the meeting between Swedish
and immigrant students across linguistic and social barriers
and is especially valuable in allowing the immigrant
children to feel they can perform on equal terms with the
Swedish youngsters and at times even outshine them
(reprinted in "In the Company of Shakespeare", p.4)
Since Sweden does not have a centrally controlled national
curriculum and each school is free to select its own
programme and textbooks it is very difficult to make
generalizations about what is currently being taught in
Swedish schools. There is however, little doubt in my mind
that politicians and society in general give greater
priority to subjects that have a clear "use value" like the
natural sciences and information technology. Many Swedish
schoolchildren leave school without much knowledge of
classic Swedish writers and have even less knowledge of the
great classics of Western literature.
A symptomatic resistance to the idea of allocating much time
to the recognition of the need for such training as part of
the regular syllabus for teacher candidates, is reflected in
Bengt Börjesson's observation in his abovementioned
report (pp. 8-10) that one of the problems encountered has
been that of persuading the decision-makers to include the
project as part of the core curriculum thereby ensuring that
all future teachers will be exposed to this pedagogic
method. At present the regular syllabus for teacher
education continues to give priority to a more theoretical
and traditional classroom approach to didactics. The aim of
the next phase of the project is therefore to have the
Shakespeare workshops included as part of the core
curriculum rather than as an optional module.
Swedish educators stress the role of the school in
transmitting the values of a democratic post enlightenment
society. The pedagogy described in the Shakespeare project
is an important exercise in team- work and in teaching
respect for the individual; values that are more important
than ever in what has become an increasingly multi-cultural
Europe. The participants learn how to work together as a
team with a common goal, they acquire self-confidence and
enjoy the recognition of both their classmates and their
teachers. Significantly, teachers claim that many of the
children of immigrants who do not perform well in other
school subjects do well in the Shakespeare project and
surmount the barriers of class, race and cultural through
their participation in it. In making all the pupils in a
given class learn some of the best lines that have ever been
written in English and by making them perform in front of an
audience, teachers are in effect training them in one of the
most creative ways of using language. Not only do these
lines become a part of each pupil's "mental and spiritual
baggage", (Feuer, 121) they also learn to express meaning
them through gestures and deeds.
It is of course possible to question the value of learning a
few isolated lines from Shakespeare's texts but in his
introduction to The Essential Shakespeare Ted Hughes
argues that if there is only one way to read Shakespeare
(i.e. the complete text of the play) it can actually limit
the use of his lines as poetry. For example, the relevance
of Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow" speech:
…is then confined to Macbeth's unique predicament in a
sacrosanct, old-fashioned play rather than applied directly
to our immediate plight as ephemeral creatures facing the
abyss on a spinning-ball of self-delusion. Obviously, by
reading the passage out of context, one is missing the great
imaginative experience of the drama&emdash;but one is
missing that anyway. The speech on its own is something
else, read in less than a minute, learned in less than five,
still wonderful, and a pure bonus." (Hughes,
"Introduction",pp. 4-5).
Indeed, the complete plays are still there for each
individual to discover once her/his appetite to learn more
has been whetted. As Shakespeare has been established as a
cultural icon for several hundred years it is clearly an
advantage, even if only in terms of "cultural capital", to
have been introduced to him at an early age. The long-term
impact of this unique experiment can only be speculated upon
but my own persuasion is that it cannot help but be
significant and enduring.
References:
Barn och Kultur, nr.5, Autumn 1993
Börjesson, Bengt, "Shakespeareprojektet vid
Lärarhögskolan", In the Company of Shakespeare:
ett möte over 400 år, Stockholm, 1999 (a brochure
available through Dramaten, Stockholm)
Edman, Eva, "Shakespears texter sätter ord på
barnens upplevelser", Barn och Kultur, above.
Feuer, Donya, " In the Company of Shakespeare and Ted
Hughes", The Epic Poise, ed. Nick Gammage,1998, pp.118-121.
(reprinted in In the Company of Shakespeare,
above)
Harding, Lotta, "Magiskt arbete med rytmen och kraften i
språket", Barn och Kultur, above
Hughes, Ted, The Essential Shakespeare, New Jersey:
Ecco Press, 1991
Lille, Petter, "Shakespeare Kommer", Barn och Kultur,
above.
Linder, Marie and Christina Holmqvist, "Allvarliga ord om
live, kärleken och döden", Barn och Kultur,
above.
Ishrat Lindblad, Stockholm University, October, 2001.
e-mail
Nov. 2001
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