ABSTRACT
When I took A Level English the exam required us to put a passage from the set Shakespeare play into our own words, so we had to practise doing so. There was no pretence that what we produced was in any way to be preferred to the original, or even that we learned much from the process; the aim was simply to find out whether we understood what we’d been reading. This form of examining has largely disappeared, perhaps because of arguments like this from Michael Pafford:
With Shakespeare, as with other poets, we will frequently have to paraphrase for children because the paraphrasable part of the sense of the language is often obscured for them by poetic compression or convention or archaism. We will, however, never ask them to paraphrase for us: as a testing device we do not need it because we can sense whether they have understood it or not: as a teaching exercise it is toxic to poetry in giving the impression that when you have said what it is saying in other words you have said all that it is saying.1
