V is for Henry V by William Shakespeare

Did you see what I did there? V. Ha, inspired! Actually, I've never read/seen Henry V, so this post is going to be about Shakespeare in general. Because I hate him. No, sorry... I used to hate him.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare

At school, I hated him. I studied Antony and Cleopatra at GCSE, and it put me off. Far too much politics!

Then I started A Levels and we read Much Ado About Nothing. This was much easier to understand: firstly it's about love - simple! - and my teacher was fantastic at explaining line by line, and pointing out all the rude bits, and when the Kenneth Branagh version was released I could understand it all! Yay for me!

Jump forward to 2011 - my son aged 12 saw that Hamlet was coming to a theatre near us and wanted to go. So, fearing he wouldn't understand or enjoy it - and fearing I wouldn't either - I took him. (Just him and me, which rarely happens, and probably helps to explain my fondness of this memory.) We had a great time. What amazed me the most was how caught up in the action my son was. He asked a couple of questions at half-time, and explained a couple of things to me too!

Shakespeare should not be read from a book. It is pretty much incomprehensible. Seeing it on stage should be compulsary for anyone attempting to study it. Shakespeare wrote plays! Plays belong on the stage!

I wouldn't say I love Shakespeare now, but I certainly appreciate everything that has happened in literature because of him - and I'm looking forward to seeing another production with my son one day - and therefore Shakespeare has to be part of this series.

U is for Un-studying Literature

Back on D Day (no, not the one in 1944, the one at the beginning of this challenge) I wrote about Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and what I'd really have liked to say to the English teacher who made me study it. As I am totally lacking any U references at all, I thought I'd use this post to continue my rant.

About three days into my English Literature A Level, I realised I shouldn't be on the course, because that was the time I realised literature shouldn't be studied, it should be enjoyed.

I know... that's a mind-bending statement, isn't it? Well, no - not unless you're an English teacher.

Think about the writers we study:

• Shakespeare
• The Brontes
• Thomas Hardy
• Charles Dickens
• Wordsworth

And, what do all these writers have in common? They were all popular writers. They weren't writing high literature - that's the mantel we've placed them on. They were writing prose that the common man in the street would find enjoyable. They probably didn't place too much store on the symbolism and metaphors used. They just wrote, the same way you and I do, telling their story in the most effective way.

So, this week, what I'd love to say to my English teacher is:

We shouldn't be doing this. We should be enjoying the books the way they were intended. We should think about the themes, enjoy the story, perhaps even consider the moment in history they are portraying - what better way to understand history than through the eyes of people who lived in it. Yes, these authors had important things to say about the world they were living in. They don't deserve to have their prose broken down into blocks of text for 18 year olds to pour over in sticky school halls, extracting every last significance out of every last full stop and semi-colon. Sometimes, Mr English Teacher, Sir, I'm sure they chose to describe the sky as cloudy because it just was, not to foretell something terrible in a hundred pages time!