[DMB]

I am fascinated by this discussion. I am English, aged 71, and was first introduced to Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice) at school when I was 12. At that age, it was simply one of the inexplicable things that school made you do. I also had to study Macbeth and Richard II during the next two years. Then just before I was 15 I had changed countries, returned to England and was in the sixth form. English school education becomes very specialised quite young, and most students are restricted to only a few subjects at this stage. When I changed schools, I was forced to change my specialist subjects because (Shock! Horror!) I had been following a mixture of arts and sciences. The new school considered me to be primarily a mathematician, so I was shunted into doing a lot more maths and also physics. I had to give up French and art, which were the other subjects I was doing.

However, after a month or so, the headmistress called me in and said that I was in danger of becoming an illiterate scientist and was therefore to take up advanced-level English. I still don't think much of the way the school was run, but I am eternally grateful for that decision, which transformed my education. I gained a brilliant English teacher who could make anything we had to study come alive. In those days our syllabus didn't include anyone after Jane Austen and barely any 18th-century writers. It was firmly fixed on the 15th-17th centuries. But IMO that was good, because there is no doubt that Chaucer is harder to read and requires more help than, say, Dickens. And I was inspired to fill in the gaps in my own time. I even elected to do an A-level exam paper on George Bernard Shaw without any teaching at all.

One of our texts was Hamlet, which we had to study over two years in some depth.

All the time I was at school, I never saw a Shakespearean production apart from a simply terrible amateur Macbeth. But once I left school, I started going to see all sorts of plays. I think English people are very lucky to have an excellent theatrical tradition and it isn't difficult to track down professional productions of most Shakespeare plays. For many years I have gone to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and also to the National Theatre, where one can see competent and sometimes excellent versions of the plays.

Some Shakespeare plays I have seen only once, but many I have seen multiple times. What I find is that the text and the performances complement each other. Having studied Hamlet fairly intensively at school, I find it easier to get a great deal from the performances. But however many times I see it, I usually discover something new each time. And usually the performances send me back to the text.

For me, live performances are almost always better than films, even remarkable ones like Kenneth Branagh's marathon Hamlet. I have often enjoyed good amateur productions. There is a bond between audience and actors that cannot be reproduced in the more passive milieu of the cinema.

If films and video are all you have access to, then I certainly think for children at school they should be an essential part of the experience. When my son was doing his International Baccalaureate, his Language A subject, which was essentially world literature (in translation if necessary) included a number of plays: Death of Salesman, A Doll's House, Waiting for Godot and King Lear. One of his two English teachers was a bit of a zero, so I helped him with the syllabus. I was able to take him to excellent stage productions of all but King Lear, so for that we relied on videos. I must admit that for me Waiting for Godot seemed deadly boring on the page, but once I had seen a tip-tip production, it came alive and I could return to the text with renewed enthusiasm.

Now that I'm old, I go to see Shakespeare for enjoyment, not to accrue brownie points for erudition. But I had a French friend, now sadly dead, who was a genuine Shakespearian scholar. When I waxed enthusiastic about a performance I had just seen, he contended that only from the text could one experience the full depth of Shakespeare. He was greatly exercised by questions of variant texts and the physical resources of the Elizabethan theatre. I could only follow him in part. Who is to say which is the better position?

I second those who say that children should be helped to tackle difficult things. That's one of the main purposes of school IMO. I find, for example, that I have only the sketchiest understanding of chemistry, because I never studied it properly at school. I have never subsequently been sufficiently motivated to set aside time to study it.

Study of the classics can be very rewarding and is a way of putting one in contact with other cultures as well as one's own. I have gained great enjoyment from reading and seeing English-language productions of Ancient Greek plays. A single production of Le Tartuffe sent me to eager reading of Molière, who is still funny at least in parts. Similarly seeing a production of Phèdre in English translation sent me off to read the original French. I wish I had more languages so as to be able to sample great works in their original form.

School education in the end is no more than planting seeds for future learning. Some will geminate; others won't. But we should not give up trying.