Something Rotten

“Why do we have to study Shakespeare, anyway?” I recall
Joshua sneering, his shirt hanging out and pinging a ruler off the chipped end
of the formica desk in that recognisbaly annoying manner that so many of us can
probably identify with from our own experiences of school. At the time, I saw
it as yet another one of those time wasting exercises pupils love to instigate
at the beginning of a lesson, a Unit, a term, to send the teacher off into
‘Waffle-Mode’ so they can waste more time doodling on book covers, staring out
steamed up windows or tapping their iphones and Samsungs under the desk, but
looking back, I guess he had a point. An important one really. Why is it so
vital to study Shakespeare? What does studying Shakespeare really do for anyone?

 I could have gone down different routes with the answer, the whole ‘Shakespeare was the greatest exponent, of the English Language that ever lived….’ or  ‘It is a part of our shared heritage and culture (is that even a tiny bit true anymore?)– Shakespeare teaches us, who we really are….’ and all that drivel,  but I don’t think I said either of those, and if I’m honest, I don’t really believe either of them either, even though I suppose a part of me convinces myself I do, at least up to a point, at the beginning of every school year. For a teacher of English, I’m not really that ‘well read’ if I’m honest,  certainly in terms of Shakespeare – I’ve read the plays I did at school, then at University and I know enough about the plays I have had to teach during my stint in Secondary schools, and a few of
the Sonnets,  to get by, but I’m not (or was not) like Mr Barrington – a quotation, for every situation kind of guy. When you were worried about Ofsted, it was ‘If
it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now….—the
readiness is all.’ I used to think he was a pretentious buffoon. I didn’t have
Shakespeare in my head like him. Or like Ms Walker, who had walked the boards
when she was younger and played a pretty good Ophelia, in an amateur production
one year. No,  I could take most of
Shakespeare or leave it, if it wasn’t for the job. Poor old Barrington. Poor
old Ms Walker. I can see their faces now, a whiter shade of pale.

Now I’m not so
sure that Shakespeare isn’t important – ‘the readiness is all’ - that really
means something – it really does -  but
how anyone could have been ready for this, I don’t know. I wasn’t. I was just
lucky. I feel like I should be starting to well up now, but I don’t; sitting
here looking at the backs of all the heads, I feel strangely detached and like
I’m in an audience about to watch the curtain go up and anpther play to begin.
‘All the world’s a stage….we are but players who strut our hour….’  Mr Barrington would have quipped.  

So I think I replied ‘It’s on the bleeding exam Joshua, so
that’s why we have to do the ‘S’ word – (That’s what I’d call it – the ‘S’
word) which kind of got the kids on side, as they recognised like me, there was
a sense, that like so much in our lives, Shakespeare was just another bit of
s*** we had to deal with and if nothing else, doing Shakespeare teaches you
that – there’s a load of incomprehensible needlessly difficult s*** that we
have to cope with in life and it’s got to be done, so knuckle down and get on
with it.

Knuckle down. Too true.

 I found that
graffitid on my classroom wall once next to a crudely drawn phallus, so it must
be a go to line I use: ‘Knuckle down.’ 
‘When’s the penny going to drop?’ and 
‘Pull your socks up!” are two other favourites, apparently, which I
discovered coming across a Year 9 pupil doing a passable impression of me on
the basketball courts at break one day. These are the irritated little phrases
that pupils mimicking my frustrated tirades as we head closer to the exam
season, and the data is not looking as rosy as it should do, remember of me.
Apparently, it comes from the game of marbles, when a player has to turn their
hand palm upwards, and the knuckle is down in readiness to push the marble
along – from American English, so I’m sure a phrase old Barrington wouldn’t have
ever used.  Some smart talkers, would
reply – ‘I can’t hold a pen with my knuckles down, sir!’ to which I would reply
– ‘You’re in here at lunch, writing out the definition of metaphor a hundred
times’ which usually shut them up. (Although some would make a lewd hand
gesture with their knuckles down, in response alos, which would earn them a
detention straight off).

But knuckling down, in the true sense of the phrase, is
exactly what ‘Joshua’ did – it was a surprise if I’m honest – a boy who got
into Shakespeare big time – there were always a smattering of those kinds of
boys at A Level, who within the predominantly female classes, would grow in
confidence in terms of expressing themselves about the finer points of Literature
– but at GCSE it was often quite an unusual occurrence, especially in a middle
set, where Joshua resided – his target grade was a ‘5’ so going by the data,
not aiming that high, but as Mr Barrington would have said ‘If you fix your
courage to the sticking place, then you’ll not fail’ and he was certainly after
a few weeks into the term aiming pretty high for a boy in his position, in
terms of Shakespeare. Most boys were a nightmare in those middle and lower
sets, and he’d fitted that profile in Year 9 perfectly: football obsessive;
hyperactive; fidget spinning; mobile phone addicted, mysoginistic pratface.
That was Joshua, like most of those boys in the full midst of the battlefield
of puberty.

But as we read the play at the start of the term, it was evident
he started to connect in a way that was surprising –  that was unusual. It was the questions he
asked.

“Why does his mum not want him to go to University?”     “How come he talks to himself so much?”

“Is Hamlet queer, or what?”      “Why doesn’t he sleep with Ophelia?”

I mean, they are not necessarily your top set stuff – some
kids are grasping feminist and psychoanalytical critiques even in Year 10, but
even so, Joshua’s questions were genuine. They weren’t an attempt to sound
clever, they were a sign of engagement and actually, they made me think about
the play a lot more than I had with a middle set group in mind, for years.

I mean, it was really Joshua who forced me or gave me the
impetus to be more experimental with my teaching – he’d gone out and got the
study guides off of his own bat; he’d stick around after lessons to ask me
questions and he’d even gone on line and watched a whole bunch of performances
– I knew I had something special on my hands when he asked me: “Do you think
the casting for Olivier’s film was deliberate in terms of pushing the whole
Freudian thing….?”  I mean, it was pretty
impressive. Made you actually enjoy being a teacher again. Not quite ‘My
Captain; My Captain’ stuff but not that far off.

So I ditched my usual, watch the film, overview the plot –
read and annotate key scenes and test on characters and quotations structure
and started being a bit more spontaneous. Once, we took the whole class over
into the ‘quad’ which was in the old school building – it was pretty miserable
weather, but I had the class under one of the awnings and Joshua played Hamlet
senior coming through the mist….it was great. A load of them filmed it on their
mobiles and it ended up on youtube. Footage of Joshua, dressed in makeshift armour
I’d plundered from the drama department, bellowing ‘Remember me! Remember me!’
through the mist – the other kids exploded into applause at the end of it and
well, it taught me so much about what I’d forgotten about teaching in the last
fifteen years – the idea that texts can actually touch pupils in real and
powerful ways and that they can inform their lives. For the better, of course.
That’s what I felt then….For the better. Not just box ticking data driven hoops
to jump through but life itself. I hadn’t quite grasped how much these texts
could touch me though and those around me.

They took the footage down eventually. It seemed too upsetting.

I’ve deliberately sat in the middle row – there was a seat
for me at the front, but I’m starting to feel like a ghost at the feast
everywhere I go in the school now and I wanted to hide myself away. If I’m
honest, I feel like I’m the guilty one. Like I am responsible. It’s ridiculous
of course, but there it is. That’s the way I feel – it’s like this toothache
that’s constantly there and won’t go away and I don’t really know if it ever
will.

I remember the parents evening, leading up to the exams, and
Joshua’s mum – you could tell, she’d had a tough evening in terms of feedback,
but my loquacious rhapsodising about Joshua’s engagement with Shakespeare
pepped her up so much, she burst into tears.

“Thank you so much – for all your help. He loves his
Shakespeare, he really does,” she sniffed through her tissue – “What with his
dad – you probably know – it’s been tough – “

I didn’t know. These things are rarely passed down to us
unless there’s a sense that we should know. Pastoral teams know an awful lot
that often your average class teacher doesn’t even have a hint of. Sexual
abuse. Unemployment. Mental illness. I didn’t have a clue that Joshua’s dad was
in prison and that he had a pretty difficult relationship with his mum.

Now this isn’t the story you think it is – Joshua didn’t
suddenly dip. He didn’t go off the rails. In fact, as the exams neared, he was
more and more fixed to the rails and just got incredibly and intensely into the
play, than I’d thought possible. What had initially been surprising, and had
then become exciting and hugely rewarding had become a little bit exhausting
and frankly, well, I know a teacher shouldn’t say it, but annoying….

When I was packing up books, and rushing to go and pick up
my kids from nursery, there was Joshua with some obscure critical essay on
Hamlet that he wanted to discuss. When I was dashing off to a meeting about why
so many boys at GCSE were lagging behind at the Grade 4 5 boundary with the
Head, there was Joshua, wanting to discuss a Marxist critique of Claudius’ role
in the plot. When I was dashing off to eat a sandwich in the ten minutes I had
left for lunch, there was Joshua, insisting the most important character in the
play was Laertes….I didn’t have the time or energy to indulge all of his
investigations and when I couldn’t, well you could see he took it a little
personally…

“I’ve got to dash….That’s really interesting, but….Look
Joshua, can you apply this to the exam though? Isn’t it going a bit far?”

It was when he realised that to do A Level Literature, which
he suddenly wanted to do more than anything, he needed B Grades or 6s in other
subjects too and frankly, English Literature was the only thing he seemed to
care about other than Home Ec, which surprisingly he was pretty good at as
well. He knew it wasn’t going to happen and I feared that he would give up on
his GCSE Literature, but he seemed only to work harder, to the point where I
thought he was going to exhaust himself, physically and mentally.

“I’m going to make my Shakespeare response the best response
to the play anyone has ever done,” he told me one warm May afternoon, with the
exam a couple of weeks off. “People will talk about it for years to come.” He
had a smile on his face but he looked tired and suddenly his face changed and
he asked me, “What do you think we learn from tragedy?”

Well it was another good question. “I’m not sure Joshua – if
we are paying attention, I guess tragedy can teach us something about ourselves
– can remind us how precious life is and that we need to think carefully about
the decisions we make, as they have consequences.”

He nodded, sombrely and that was the last I heard from him,
as they went off for study leave the next day. However, on the day of the
Shakespeare exam, I dashed into the office to chuck all the rubbish in my
pigeon hole and saw a few of the department sat around the main table, tucking
into an extraordinary looking cake. It was a proper sculpted number, of a
castle and a ghost on the battlements, and an array of figures on the sponge
base sprawled out. There was Gertrude with the poisoned cup and Claudius face
down and Laertes clutching his side and there was Horatio holding up Hamlet, as
he cashed in his chips. There was even a blue icing river, running along the
side, with Ophelia clutching her violets – every little detail perfect and it
tasted pretty good too, apparently.

Beside the masterpiece was a note, that read ‘To the English
Department – thank you for all the inspiration’.

The whole department had tucked in and said it was delicious
– if I hadn’t remembered I was on Year 9 playground duty, ‘on the outer reaches
of the empire’ then I would have had a large slice myself, but I made a dash
for it with my sandwiches. But I did holler, “Who made that then?” as I made an
exit stage left and Barrington, whilst forking a part of Ophelia’s drowned
corpse from his plate uttered ‘It must have been your middle set chap…your
Eliza Doolittle; Joshua, isn’t it….’ And I don’t know why, but I felt a sort of
unease – maybe I’m imagining it now, but I felt it was unexpected and a little
troubling, to the extent that maybe I should have stopped, maybe….but how could
I have known?

It was during afternoon registration that it kicked in and
Barrington was the first to feel the effects apparently – his poor little Year
7 tutor group watched him as he collapsed and the whole school was plunged into
chaos as all the members of the English Department, one by one, started to
react in a similar manner, dropping like flies.

It was me, (or I….) who made the  dash for the staff room and removed the cake,
a substantial amount of which was still there and the Police were interested at
first, that I’d done that – asked me repeatedly about that, in the interviews,
about why I’d tried to remove the evidence – I just didn’t want to put anyone
else in danger I’d told them, and they’d asked me ‘How did you know?’

Well – I don’t know – it was his obsession with Shakespeare
– it got too much – I mean, he had a point, when he asked me why we teach
children about all these poisonings and suicides and murders…

It wasn’t the police who requested his exam paper – it was
me – and I remember opening the envelope in the Department meeting (all the new
staff were chatting nervously, two NQTs among the new recruits) and one of the
newbies asked me what I was reading – I think they could see I was looking pale
– my trembling hand passed the paper to them and in a spidery hand, the answer
booklet was filled with line after line of WORDS  WORDS WORDS….