Creative Shakespeare by Fiona Banks
Review by Peter King Published by Bloomsbury
The quickest shortcut to getting under the skin of Shakespeare is to visit the crucible of English drama – the reconstructed Globe.
And the exploratory, inclusive process that generates the finest performances is reflected in the many voices of Globe Education’s consultants contributing to this practical guide.
Teachers who have witnessed their pupils being enthused by youthful educational practitioners leading workshops at Shakespeare’s Globe will recognise that the book comes with genuine credentials – and that the exercises have been forged in trial by adolescents.
Approaches hammered out on the Globe’s boards are here served up for schools to try, including whispering the speech, using words as weapons, teaching the iambic pentameter via the haka and creating heart trace print-outs to plot line length.
One exercise involves identifying the first and last stressed syllables of every line and completing a chronological list to provide a picture of character and action. From time to time there are pearls of throwaway wisdom, such as the observation that most soliloquies fall naturally into three parts, as well as the occasional piece of special pleading: ‘We do not speak in prose.
The iambic pentameter is the closest we have to the form in which we speak English in everyday life.’ There is also refreshing evidence that the author has had close encounters with real-life school chaos: ‘Never underestimate, in a school, the possible disruption to the rehearsal process. I once observed an hour-long rehearsal… in which there were 36 different interruptions culminating in the entrance of an adult dressed as a pixie.’