Honestly it gets on my nerves how the school system handles Shakespeare, and it’s because of its poor handling of Shakespeare that so many people hate his plays and view them as boring or uninteresting.
I’ve acted in Shakespeare plays for about six years now and after spending just one unit in school on Romeo and Juliet, the reason why people hate Shakespeare becomes so much more understandable. I learned Shakespeare’s plays, his rhyming scheme and scansion through putting on productions of the shows, and that’s how Shakespeare should be taught.
Shakespeare’s works aren’t meant to be read by anyone other than the actors putting on the show. It isn’t supposed to be enjoyed like that. Shakespeare is at its best when it’s being watched or it’s being performed. His plays are scripts for a reason. Scripts are the groundwork for a performance and when schools assign endless reading of his plays, they essentially feed their students the bare bones of Shakespeare.
Acting is what makes the show come alive. In my most recent production, I remember cold-reading Love’s Labors Lost and being so confused about the story and how this could ever be considered a comedy. By performance day, we were up onstage loving every bit of the story, and the audience, who knew as much as the cast had on our first day with the scripts, was laughing at the jokes we initially didn’t get the first time. Acting is what conveys Shakespearean text and the witty lines that are much harder to understand today, but the actor’s choices onstage (be it actions, tone of voice or movement) are there to explain it all.
Shakespeare is at its most relatable and enjoyable when it’s being performed, and that was how things were always intended to be. Making students read these scripts as if they were textbooks is a one-way fast track to making a class confused, frustrated, and hating these plays.
TLDR: Shakespeare and acting are inseparable, and schools need to stop ignoring that fact if they want their students to actually care about these plays.
