Shakespeare Valued: Education Policy and Pedagogy 1989-2009

Introduction

Shakespeare has inhabited an unrivalled position as the only compulsory author in English education since the subject’s National Curriculum was introduced in 1989. Reading his works aloud had been required for the minority of the population sitting the very highest levels of the Victorian Standards (and similar subsequent leavers’ qualifications) and study of Shakespeare had been recommended for extension to all pupils in publications such as the Newbolt Report. The National Curriculum, however, finally guaranteed an experience of Shakespeare to all children before leaving school: ‘all’ excluding students for whom the curriculum could be disapplied, such as those with learning difficulties, and independent schools (though in practice many chose to follow it). Its statutes are prime examples of the immense value that was formally assigned to Shakespeare by policy-makers, in English education, in the late 1980s: specifically, for a universal Shakespeare that could be taught, examined and legislated. That examination of his value was witnessed further by the amount of pedagogic literature on Shakespeare produced in the immediate aftermath of – and much of it in opposition to – the introduction of the National Curriculum. Beyond education in the classroom, Shakespeare’s long-standing value in theatre, heritage and tourism has, for decades, been attested to by organisations such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Shakespeare’s Globe – each of which also acknowledges his place in the curriculum through their substantial education departments.

Commonplace statements that declare Shakespeare to be ‘the greatest writer in the English language’ and ‘the greatest playwright of all time’ both draw on and reinforce values for Shakespeare in education. Such clichés usefully highlight Shakespeare’s unique position and widely-constructed, high cultural value. As conclusions in themselves they are, however, reductive: they unhelpfully elide the processes of negotiation and contestation that have gone in to creating his value; the tensions that exist around it; as well as the multiple definitions and everyday practices that help to construct it. Yet expressions such as ‘that’s not Shakespeare’ or ‘that’s not really Shakespeare’, heard in the theatre, the living room or on the streets of Stratford-upon-Avon, are reminders of the fraught and contested nature of his value. Extending over the twenty years following the inception of National Curriculum Shakespeare, this book goes beyond asking what the value of Shakespeare is in England; it explores how it is constructed in the documents created by governments as well as educators, writing for and working in schools, theatre education departments and heritage organisations.

Some of the constructions of Shakespeare’s value herein are deliberate and explicit, such as those resulting from a particular political persuasion or a need to get punters to attend Shakespeare-related events. For instance, policy and reality-television cast knowledge of and facility with Shakespeare’s works as a solution to crises in education, social mobility, aspiration, youth unemployment and immigration (Olive 2013). Other assumptions about value, however, appear more unwitting, organic or incidental, although they may be taken up to support particular agendas. These include Shakespeare as human, icon and icon-maker. The range of stakeholders engaged in these constructions includes politicians and policy-makers; educators, scholars and students in schools, universities and arts organisations; as well as scriptwriters and programme-makers (Olive 2013). Using diverse, often everyday, sources from teacher training manuals to marketing material, this book explores the way in which the existing, multi-faceted and pervasive value of Shakespeare is generated, modified and sustained by key individuals and organisations (governments and theatre companies, for example) in formal and informal educational settings. In doing so, it counteracts assertions, still too readily made and received, of his inherent value in terms of the universality or the greatness of his works. It also problematises generalised, essentialist explanations by attributing individual agency for the origins and proliferation of such constructions where possible. It does not attempt to duplicate teachers’ accounts of their practice with Shakespeare in the classroom as articulated in collections such as Martin Blocksidge’s Shakespeare in Education.

Despite formal education being the most common way in which the population encounters his work, and hence formative of attitudes towards it, education has been historically under-examined in scholarly Shakespearean publications and at international conferences. This is especially conspicuous in comparison to the volume of titles and seminars on performance history, literary criticism and the textual study of Shakespeare. With almost every child nationally, and fifty per cent of children globally, experiencing Shakespeare in the classroom, there is a need for much more detailed research and publication in this area (Royal Shakespeare Company 2008). The impetus for such work has been largely demonstrated by individual, cross-sector organisations leading to the development of saleable products. For example, the University of Warwick and Royal Shakespeare Company’s CAPITAL Centre, designed to demonstrate the mutually beneficial relationship between classroom and rehearsal room techniques, has evolved into ‘Teaching Shakespeare’. Teaching Shakespeare is a centre run in collaboration with Warwick’s Business School, which provides professional development for teachers worldwide using online resources.

In terms of publications on Shakespeare in education, Teaching Shakespeare is also the name of a magazine published and made freely available online by the British Shakespeare Association to disseminate research and resources to Shakespeare educators across the sectors (a magazine which I edit). The journals of teaching organisations such as the National Association for Teachers of English and English Association also demonstrate an ongoing concern with Shakespeare in policy and practice. However, the limited scope and word lengths of articles in such publications, combined with an intention to shape and guide teaching practice, means that research tends to be ungeneralisable and under-theorised. This may, in turn, perpetuate the editorial policy of academic journals, such as Shakespeare, of declining to publish education-related articles. From individual researchers, there are publications (rather than series) on Shakespeare in education and culture that go beyond describing and recommending classroom practice or close-reading individual manifestations of his presence in popular culture; examples include Andrew Murphy’s Shakespeare for the People and Denise Albanese’s Extramural Shakespeare. Yet, the scope of these two recent publications is centred on nineteenth-century Britain and present-day North America respectively, offering space for this book’s attention to Shakespeare in twentieth- and twenty-first-century England.

Meaning by Shakespeares

Before going further in demonstrating the enmeshed relationship of education and culture in regards to Shakespeare, it is crucial to outline what this book means when it invokes the terms ‘Shakespeare’, ‘culture’, ‘education’ and ‘value’. Since he is a ‘public object’ – ‘his name [...] as familiar in bars and restaurants as it is in classrooms and lecture-halls’ – ‘Shakespeare’ invokes a plethora of meanings in a variety of contexts (Albanese 2010: 3; Hawkes 1996: 1). A non-exhaustive list might include: ‘Shakespeare’ the person; ‘Shakespeare’ the body of works; ‘Shakespeare studies’ the academic field; and ‘Shakespeare’ the theatrical, heritage or tourist phenomenon. Each of these propagates sub-categories. ‘Shakespeare’ the person, for instance, could be broken down into the child, the grammar school student, lover, husband, father, actor, writer, businessman, Londoner and Stratfordian. Douglas Lanier summarises these Shakespeares succinctly and poetically as: ‘The Shakespeare of the London stage, The Shakespeare of the printed page, The rural Shakespeare of Stratford’ (2010: 147). Michael Bristol, demonstrating the ‘complex semantics and patterns of usage’ associated with the name ‘Shakespeare’, adds further categories still, broadening out from the more objective definitions to include the negative connotations that the word might carry for some users: Shakespeare is ‘a system of cultural institutions, and, by extension, a set of attitudes and dispositions. It defines taste communities and cultural positioning [...] it may also signify privilege, exclusion and cultural pretension’ (1996: ix). Where Bristol shows Shakespeare to be a loaded term for a certain audience, Lanier ends his list with a definition that illustrates how the term is deliberately invested with meaning by certain groups: ‘The increasingly mythic Shakespeare praised by critics and nationalists – and the specific interests they serve’ (2010: 147). Unless otherwise specified or evident from the context of its usage, it is these multiple and messy meanings that I want to evoke when the word ‘Shakespeare’ appears in this book.

Tracing a Cultural Politics of Shakespeare

This book is overwhelmingly concerned with constructions of Shakespeare’s value in England’s educational culture. Raymond Williams describes ‘culture’ as one of the most complicated words in the English language (1983: 87). Culture, for instance, is variously conceived of as an end and a means of education. In the former sense, the word has been used for several centuries to refer to exclusively ‘high’ or ‘elite’ culture: art forms such as theatre, literature, painting and music. It has been described as ‘the work and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity’ (1983: 90). Such a definition of culture all too frequently excludes entertainment, ‘mass’ pursuits or ‘popular’ pastimes, as already illustrated by then culture secretary Tessa Jowell’s use of the term, which is discussed in detail later in this chapter. This continuity suggests that the critique of the New Left (activists and educators seeking wide-ranging social reform in the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1960s and 1970s) has not been wholly successful in realising its aim of rethinking and reconstructing definitions of ‘culture’.

Culture, when defined as elite art forms, is connected directly to the purpose of education: it is objectified as a group of items, or experiences, exposure to and familiarity with which will lead to the concrete outcomes of being (perceived as) educated and cultured. Pierre Bourdieu has explicated the way in which this learning about culture is unarticulated, indirect, passed between generations of the bourgeois, through his work on cultural capital theory. Others, including Paul DiMaggio, have demonstrated the positive relationship between possessing cultural capital and social mobility. Despite Bourdieu’s emphasis on its untaught and unstudied nature and because of DiMaggio’s insistence on its relationship to social mobility, culture continues to be something that schools are expected to bolster in their students.

Yet, ‘culture’, in its more egalitarian, anthropological sense of ‘the society we live in’, can also be figured as a means of education. For progressive educationalists such as Ivan Illich and A.S. Neill, as well as the psychologist Jerome Bruner, education is culturally saturated: not only do we learn informally from our everyday existence and participation in society but our education systems operate within those of our wider culture (Bruner 1996: ix). Bruner, for example, points to the way in which cultural expectations of what children should achieve drive educational provision: ‘How one conceives of education, we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of the culture and its aims, professed and otherwise’ (x). Where I use the term ‘culture’, as opposed to citing or analysing others’ usage, it is this anthropological meaning of ‘a particular way of life’ for a nation or a tribe, the objects and activities of a people, group or time, that I wish to invoke, largely England between 1989 and 2009 (Williams 1983: 92). While such usage has a homogenising tendency, it has the merit of treating even the most mundane objects and activities as important – in contrast to the evaluative and hierarchical idea of culture.

This book adds to cultural histories of the development of English as a subject, by looking specifically at Shakespeare’s place in English education in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Francis Mulhern’s The Moment of Scrutiny contextualises the particular influence of Leavis, and the journal that he edited, within the growth of English as a subject, English culture and ‘taste’ more generally. Others such as Chris Baldick’s The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848–1932, and William St. Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, reach back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They detail the way in which mass literacy and access to literature was won, largely against the wishes of the cultural elites, and on what terms. Baldick highlights, for example, paternalistic rationales for the widespread teaching of English: literature as a civilising influence and as a source of moral fortitude, especially against the allegedly corrupting influence of mass culture. Cultural histories of reading and literature with a greater focus on Shakespeare include those by Michael Bristol and Gary Taylor. In Big-time Shakespeare, Bristol traces the role of Thatcherite policy in commercialising the playwright; he also conveys the way in which the ‘phenomenon’ of Shakespeare is collectively ‘generated out of the innumerable small-time accomplishments of actors and directors, advertising copy-writers, public relations specialists, as well as scholars, editors, and educators’ (1996: 6). Using models from economics – such as ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ – he delineates how and why Shakespeare continues to have cultural currency in British society with reference to examples from modern popular culture throughout. In this way, his book is emblematic of another genre of work on the value of Shakespeare, which is concerned not with old ruling elites, or recent politics, but with his worth as constructed by present mundane, cultural and commercial practices. In doing so, it draws on the growth of cultural studies in academia during the second half of the twentieth century.

In addition, other interdisciplinarities (or multidisciplinarities) are evidenced in such work by the influence of cultural economics, media studies, anthropology and sociology. Gary Taylor, for example, in Cultural Selection, explores how and why certain cultural objects or memories survive and prevail while others perish. Where Bristol confines himself to Britain, Taylor employs a global frame of reference. To further compare Bristol’s and Taylor’s approaches, Bristol’s discourse is predominantly that of cultural economics, deploying vocabulary such as ‘the Shakespeare industry’, cultural ‘product’ and ‘market’, where literary critics have traditionally written of Shakespeare and his audiences. In contrast, Taylor uses the mechanisms of individual memory and psychology to illustrate his discussion. Meanwhile, two of Taylor’s other works, Reinventing Shakespeare and ‘The incredible shrinking Bard’, deal more specifically with Shakespeare’s fate in print, in theatre, higher education and popular culture, with the latter title suggesting, quite uniquely among the criticism, that Shakespeare’s cultural lifespan – and thus perhaps his value – is finite.

These books are overwhelmingly characterised by a concern with cultural history. They are not energetically engaged in an activist struggle, for example, to liberate the present and future from the still-felt implications of these values for literature generally, and Shakespeare in particular. Peter Widdowson’s edited collection of essays, Re-reading English, stands out among other cultural histories of the discipline in its explicit sense of activism – since it was written in response to the Cambridge crisis in English of 1981. Its context and contents render it part of the tradition of heavily politicised (left-wing), English literary and cultural criticism from the period, reacting against the Thatcher government and its Conservative values for the arts, humanities, education and society. It combines the description of what English has been in the past, both ideally and in actuality, with impassioned, yet well-reasoned, suggestions of directions in which the subject might develop – what we now identify as new historicism, cultural materialism and interdisciplinarity. Widdowson is adamant that ‘English is necessarily a site on which social meanings are constructed’ (1982: 14), and a tool with which they must be deconstructed. Moreover, he asserts that these social meanings (or cultural values) represent legitimate material for study in the discipline.

Widdowson’s overtly politicised account of the growth of English as a subject is indicative of a burgeoning body of literature, predominant in the late eighties and mid-nineties, that relates the condition of culture, literature and education to the then prevailing political conditions: those of the Thatcher, and later Major, governments (1979–1990 and 1990–1997 respectively). For instance, an anthology of essays edited by John J. Joughin, Shakespeare and National Culture, illustrates the grounding of Shakespeare’s cultural value in concepts of nationalism, exploring the ‘powerful collusion of Shakespeare and education to shape a national culture’ (1997: 4). It depicts, with concern, the cultivation of these forces, towards the satisfaction of various social agendas, by these two successive Conservative governments. As such, it is part of the body of work in British cultural criticism from 1970s onwards, including Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield’s Political Shakespeare, which combines explicit criticism of specific governments with Marxist and other left-wing critical theory in order to examine the value of Shakespeare in education. Other works in this vein include, in the year the National Curriculum came into force, Isobel Armstrong’s ‘Thatcher’s Shakespeare?’ and Ann Thompson’s article for a dedicated education issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, ‘King Lear and the politics of teaching Shakespeare’. These articles correlate the proliferation of radical strains of Shakespeare performance and criticism with historical periods where Britain has been governed by parties on the political right.

Such works represent a peak in politically-radical, literary critique in English that has since abated. Despite thirteen years in power before its demise at the general election in May 2010, few accounts exist of the impact of New Labour’s meta-education policies on English or Shakespeare specifically. However, some analyses of meta-education policy under New Labour are available: see Richard Pring’s ‘Labour Government Policy 14–19’ and Geoff Whitty’s ‘Twenty Years of Progress?’ which are discussed in chapter one. The recognition by such authors of the construction and delivery of subject English as a political activity sets a helpful precedent for sustaining a discussion of government policy on the value of Shakespeare as part of a broader concern with his value in the English culture of education.

Contextualising Shakespeare in Education

Having outlined the way that culture figures in this book, I turn now to defining ‘education’. Education, as used throughout, refers not to (perceptions of) a condition of being (educated-ness), but practically, to a state-run activity in schools: specifically, secondary school education. However, the following chapters recognise that it is an activity sometimes undertaken by other agents, state-funded or commercial. These include, but are not limited to, the education departments of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), Shakespeare’s Globe and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT). State-conceived notions of education inflect popular culture too, through the public service remit of the BBC and other English broadcasters, that is to entertain, inform and educate. ‘Real’ experience of education is also actively drawn on by programme-makers as a resource with which to engage audiences in television viewing (Olive 2013).

Writing on education, from literature on the curriculum at large to the state school system as a whole, has enabled me to locate Shakespeare as a figure on which to hinge larger debates about the value of education. The existence of a national narrative or myth of perpetual decline regarding a wide range of English preoccupations, from the national economy to families eating together, has been noted by Hewison (1995: 305) and by Jackson, Olive and Smith (2009). This sense of a growing and unbridgeable gap between real and ideal experience, represented as a collective feeling of failure, also applies to education in general and Shakespeare specifically. It is evidenced by television programmes, such as Jamie’s Dream School, that frame their content within the context of missed government targets for employment, training and literacy (Olive 2013). A narrative of decline in education is also testified by the wealth of literature that ostensibly tackles public perceptions of flaws in the education system, but can also be seen to devalue the experience of education. Such texts include C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson’s Black Papers, Peter Abbs’ Living Powers: The Arts in Education and Frank Furedi’s Wasted; these attack the negative influence of progressivism and the lack of arts education and authority in schools respectively. They seek to impress onto the reader that the failings of education are both produced and further jeopardised by culture in England.

The publication of these books – which aim for a readership among the general public and teaching profession, perhaps to a greater extent than aspiring to an academic audience – is part of a trend that Stephen Ball identifies as the overall growth of education as a major political issue since the mid-twentieth century – and in particular to a hyperactivism in education policy over the last three decades. His argument, that change is visible at a surface level without resulting in radical alterations to education, aligns with the research of Pring and Whitty. Hyperactivism, their research suggests, is evident in successive governments’ ineffectually (but noisily) targeting similar resources and policies, differentiated not in substance but spin, at the same stubborn ‘problems’. The implications of this for Shakespeare in education, including his construction as a problem area within English, will be reflected on throughout the book.

While debates about the nature and value of education generally provide a useful context for thinking about constructions of Shakespeare in the curriculum, educational research on Shakespeare specifically is characterised by the local, anecdotal, under-theorised and un-reflexive. Much of the literature reports research undertaken with a single group of students – for instance, Jane Coles’s ‘Testing Shakespeare to the limit’ and Susan Leach’s ‘Student teachers and the experience of English’. Potentially worthwhile because of the depth