Max C.

Something that I find rather frustrating about humans in general is that it almost always takes an enormous amount of persuasion and effort to sway their opinions of things, even if they realize that their opinion isn’t the best one. This is especially true with regards to high-school students and studying Shakespeare. High school students seem to have terrible tolerance for Shakespeare, and for a while, I was no exception. I had absolutely loathed every work of Shakespeare I encountered (which is to say, not that many), and until reading Hamlet, I could never bring myself to understand his appeal, however hard I tried. In truth, before the Shakespeare summer course began, I had expected to learn very little from the week-long trip to Stratford that concluded the course in comparison to the first two weeks in the classroom. I expected our role there to be more as tourists than students, but I was quickly proven wrong. After seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions, visiting a number of historical sites, and attending the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s Shakespeare exploration course, I realized that I had achieved something very few high school students had done—I’d grown a legitimate appreciation for Shakespeare’s work.

What ended up surprising me the most about our trip was that after the first day, the entire class had grown to approach the study of Shakespeare’s life and his works with an enthusiasm that I’m sure not many of us had previously expected to have. This moment of realization came after Monday’s performance of The Merchant of Venice drew to a close. As The Merchant of Venice was not a play we read or discussed during our time in the classroom, the class was informed, much to our collective chagrin, that we would have to study Merchant during the trip to Stratford. The prospect of reading a Shakespeare play during our much-anticipated voyage to Stratford was not exactly met with universal approval, and I attempted to finish reading the play the first chance I got, hoping to rid myself of the inevitable tedium it would bring me. Unfortunately, this resulted in my having an extremely superficial understanding of the play (I must also admit that I spent a good deal of time dwelling on our edition of the play’s commentary section). Thus, I was utterly astonished the next day when our lectures at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust began, and I found that I was actually beginning to enjoy discussing The Merchant of Venice. The lecture on The Merchant of Venice given before we actually saw the play helped solidify my understanding of it, and though I had to fight to stay awake as a result of my poor acclimatization to the new time zone, I was filled with anticipation for the performance that we were to attend later that night.

When we walked out of the Royal Shakespeare Theater and started back towards our Bed and Breakfasts after the play had ended, it struck me as odd that every single member of the class was engaging in thoughtful and eager deliberation on the play that we had just watched. Such discussion went beyond mere opinion—it was the kind of conversation that would usually have to be drawn out of students in the classroom. This pattern continued for each and every performance we attended, and my fears that the post-performance discussions at the Birthplace Trust would be unexciting and dull were quickly done away with. It became an exhilarating experience to debate the merits of one actor’s performance, or a directorial choice, or different interpretations of the source material, and I soon found that I eagerly anticipated immersing myself in these discussions, which became more and more engaging as time passed.

The Birthplace Trust was also a place where all our imminent thoughts and questions regarding Shakespeare and his plays could be addressed immediately. Particularly helpful in this arena was the question and answer session we had with Royal Shakespeare Company actress Susannah Fielding, who played Portia in the Company’s production of The Merchant of Venice. This extremely informative session helped immensely in giving me an idea of what it was like to be involved in the process of bringing a Shakespearean work to life, and Fielding provided several insightful remarks towards the nature of her character in The Merchant of Venice. Through the duration of the course, we met a number of people with ties to the Company who were extremely passionate about their work, and were equally excited about sharing it with us. I’d be lying if I said that none of their devotion and excitement for their job was transferred over to me. Although we were primarily a literary study class and not a drama class, it was refreshing to see every one of us letting ourselves go and playing the part when it came to performing our Merchant scenes or participating in Michael Corbridge’s vocal exercises with Lancelot Gobbo’s speech. The drama aspect of our course was actually something I particularly enjoyed. It allowed me to see what performing and interpreting Shakespeare’s text meant to every individual, and made the entire Shakespeare experience much more tangible to me.

I came out of this trip with a much different perception of Shakespeare, classical literature, and theatre in general, and I’m sure many of my peers had the same response. It was nice to be in Stratford and experience firsthand the environment that had produced William Shakespeare, but without the guidance of the course that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust had offered us, I’m not sure if any of us would have gotten as much out of the course as we did. I may not have signed up for this course thinking that I would grow to genuinely love Shakespeare’s plays, but it seems that the outcome was just that.

 

previous   |   back to testimonials   |   next