“O piteous spectacle! O bloody times!
Whiles lions war and battle for their dens,
Poor harmless lambs abide their enmity!”

The lines, he said sombrely, spoke to him of Lebanon today.

This was not a political meeting, nor a rehearsal. It was a gathering of education professionals to launch a year-long RSC campaign about Shakespeare in schools. The company wants every child to meet the playwright’s texts, not as tasks or puzzles but as performance. All should be offered that shock of recognition which Iwuji gave us: a living breath across 400 years, proving that humanity is unchanging and that — as some wag said — Shakespeare is great in spite of all the people who say he is.

The RSC has an ambitious programme: it wants to extend its own workshops in schools and to entitle every child both to see a full performance and to try performing. It wants to offer teachers training and confidence until even the mousiest can bring the playwright off the page, and explore how the actor’s approach to a text can enlighten schoolwork. It also wants to reconsider the formal assessment of Shakespeare: and here arose the central tension of the symposium, and indeed of education today.

For curriculum tests are prim, cold things while Shakespeare is most excellently messy. For a mysterious complex of reasons, personal and historical, he has been creating catches in the throat and beatings of the heart for four centuries. A strange alchemy made it so: in his time the language was in Norman flower yet close to earthy Saxon roots; politics were dangerous and vivid, old religion and new-fed streams of deep feeling. A country-town boy took his practicality into a chaotic, anonymous capital city, and all the way to the court. A husband lived separate from a wife and lost a young son; a marketplace tradition of morality plays and ghost stories, enriched by grammar-school classics, bounced off the great scientific and philosophical ideas of the day. And there was genius: sparking, show-off, rapid-writing, recklessly adaptive genius, hungry to dazzle and delight. So all human life is there, in the old folios, ever ready to be woken.

In the right hands it wakes quickly. On Friday’s panel was Bruce Wall, of the London Shakespeare Workout, who for years has worked in prisons. Nobody who has seen it forgets the liberating effect that his workshops have on prisoners, some barely literate. Bruce can wake the tiger. So can several teachers who spoke, conjuring up a scraping-back of desks, the excitement of performance, the clash of wooden swords, the quiet child who suddenly becomes Juliet or Macbeth.

Yet there is something rotten in the state of school Shakespeare. Although lively work goes on, it is woefully common for children to be repelled. Carol Vorderman famously called Shakespeare “dull as ditchwater”; the late Professor Ted Wragg wrote, of the present Key Stage 3 test: “At its best the examination process is a check on what people have learnt . . . at its worst it can comprehensively and irrevocably hammer the life out of something, however magnificent or dynamic.”

The RSC commissioned a paper on the history of Shakespeare teaching in England. It is fascinating to see how good intentions get deformed; one cannot help but spot how many of the pitfalls afflict education in general. In Shakespeare’s case, more than a century ago it was recognised that you could not just study him as text any more than you study music merely from scores. A brave suggestion from 1908 is that when doing Julius Caesar, a class should be “transformed into a Roman mob”. In 1917 Henry Caldwell Cook wrote The Play Way with the same message. By the 1950s, however, a reverentially sedentary approach to the texts was widespread enough for A. K. Hudson to complain that people treated schoolchildren as “textual scholars in embryo”.

After the pedants came the doubters and the scoffers. The doubters decided, in the drippy Sixties, that Shakespeare was “too difficult” for most teenagers; the scoffers decried him as a dead white male whose princes and queens were “irrelevant”. For decades it was possible never to encounter him in school at all, which given the dullness engendered by the pedant tendency may have been just as well.

Now — with a renewed curricular imprimatur for school Shakespeare — there are two enemies. One is the continuing belief that he’s too hard — one teacher complained on The Times Educational Supplement forum: “Why oh why do we try to make all kids try to understand Shakespeare? It is simply criminal.” Hence the deeply dumb questions that turn up in tests, one famously demanding that students of Twelfth Night gain more than half of their marks with a general essay on “How important is what you wear?”

The other enemy is hurry: in a crowded and prescriptive syllabus it is all too easy to tick the Shakespeare box without doing more than a scene, and certainly without moving the furniture to perform it. Chilly, prissy test-teaching crowds out warmth, ideas, knockabout and spark. One teacher bravely said that he would rather let his class slip a grade than deprive them of those active, exciting lessons: but in a performance-related, league-table world, not many dare.

As so often with Shakespeare, we are pointed outward to a wider conclusion. The central trouble is that outside basic skills and strongly factual subjects, the end product of education is invisible and largely untestable. The best bits may not bear fruit for five or ten years. Learning is emotional, human, organic: there is always a leap of faith involved. And faith is best exercised by those who can see what they’re doing: teachers. Which is one of the main reasons why overzealous government bossiness is a bad thing. Wicked, even.

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