Kia Garriques

Television historian Simon Schama has recently spoken out about the idea of scrapping Shakespeare from the school curriculum, stating that it is wrong to think that he is not accessible to school children. “I think it’s incredibly patronising of anybody to suppose that is true of Shakespeare,” he told the Radio Times.

He recently judged a television show where school children competed to make a Shakespearean speech and says that none of them had any problem with the language and “were utterly wonderful.” He also added that stopping the teaching of Shakespeare “is robbing children of an incredible experience with their own language and what it means to be human.”

Schama definitely doesn’t shy away from the debate and is part of a large group of people who think that Shakespeare should be a central part of the curriculum. The Bard has always been a key aspect of secondary education as well as our culture. There are so many films and television programmes that have either modernized his plays or used the same story in a modern day setting that it’s clear we still have a very deep love affair with good ‘ole Bill.

It’s a difficult situation to untangle as many teenagers do have difficulty with understanding the complicated language as well as Shakespeare’s clever use of iambic pentameter, prose and poetry but his plays are still kept alive so they we must still have some resonance with them.

For example, what greater teenage love (or lust) story is there than Romeo and Juliet? What could be a more appropriate performance of the melodrama that teenagers feel they live through when they find their first love? Yes, the characters and settings are definitely of its time but if it’s taught in an exciting way then it’s essentially the story of two love sick teens who just take their feelings to the extreme. Today’s versions of this story are Gossip Girl, 90210 and many others that see young adults filling their lives with drama.

His language may seem terrifying at first glance but it can broken down in a way that makes the pupil feel like a detective trying to unearth all of the possibilities and once this is achieved the stories you find are still being re-enacted in today’s media but with different names and slightly more modern dilemmas. The themes of love, betrayal, insanity and everything else that Shakespeare explores are still staples of the literary and media world as well as real life and young people need to be shown that even though he lived hundreds of years ago there was once a man who could dissect the human condition in a way no one else could so there must be a reason why we’re still banging on about him.