I remember reading all my Shakespeare at school and being taken to Stratford to see two plays and watching videos of various productions and being struck by the whole ‘ethos’ that has arisen around the plays. Every generation must realise them anew, and some new productions are startlingly good though most are drab and uninventive (the greatest problem today is the fact that actors are trained mostly to do TV and film work so less attention is being paid to the timbre of the voice). One of the strangest things I hear is the way in which the natural ageing process of famous actors is tuned into the plays so you get to play King Lear when you are seventy.
Surely the brilliance of the actor is the thirty year old who makes me believe he is eighty?
But this drive to be of the moment, to revisit the classics and make them ‘relevant’ misses one huge thing, most people are not taught what makes the plays brilliant in the first place. Because I had been reading Shakespeare since I was ten due to my mother, I rarely had problems with individual words or the simpler parts of Elizabethan vocabulary. It doesn’t take much to make people understand five hundred years ago, it does take a little time.
The lilt of the language, any language, can be put into a child by the enthusiasm of the parents even as they are learning their vernacular. That understanding is a gift that will be with them all their lives and be a key to open up so much of the tradition of literature as second nature.