ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the evidence collected by the Shakespeare and Schools Project: a research and development project concerned to improve the quality of school students’ experience of Shakespeare. It is based on the views and practice of successful classroom teachers, and their students. Shakespeare’ language is both a model and a resource for students: powerfully energetic, vivid, sinewy, active, physical, robust, sensuous, volatile, immediate and reflective. Because every play has its own unique language characteristics, Shakespeare provides pupils with rich models for study, imitation and expressive, and personal re-creation. ‘School Shakespeare’ is concerned to evoke ‘informed personal response’, but not under the same conditions as public examinations making the same claim. Most editions used in schools explicitly and implicitly reinforce the pupils’ view of Shakespeare as a ‘translation’ enterprise, rather than as an imaginative, re-creative, intelligence-expanding endeavour.
