That's ironic: endings that don't have to be - Rowena House

This post is a bit of a cheat as basically I’m repurposing an ABBA article I wrote a while back – and re-found via Twitterific Writing Links, an excellent compendium of free writing advice compiled by elizabethspanncraig.com – to wonder out loud about how to repurpose classic ironic endings to serve the work-in-progress.

The reason I need to cheat is the fast-approaching end of a brilliant online plotting course run by USA story consultant Jeff Lyons, which I’m desperate to get the most out of. More of that another time...

The nub of today’s post is WHICH ironic endings might make good scene or act turning points?

Here’s the link to the original post about endings:

https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2019/08/endings-part-i-where-to-start-by-rowena.html

And here’s a summary:

Storytelling craft guides broadly agree there are four main types of endings for archetypal plots, i.e. those with one or more lead character with a defined story goal.

A positive ending is one where the protagonist achieves their goal and is happy about it, a staple for romances, for example.

A negative ending is one where the protagonist does NOT get what they want and is sad/angry/devastated about it. Or dead – and not in a nice, self-sacrificing way, either. Think Shakespeare’s King Lear, Macbeth etc.

Ambiguous or open endings leave the reader guessing whether the protagonist got what they wanted (if it’s clear what that was) and tend to be found in short stories and towards the literary end of the novel spectrum.

Ironic endings: our starting point today.

The 'character knows what they want but not what they need' ironic plot is now so popular in storytelling guides it’s hard to know if it’s a cliché or a convention. Yes, this type of irony can be powerful – Shakespeare’s Othello learns he had what he wanted all along, a loyal wife in Desdemona, but only after he’s killed her in his unwarranted jealous rage – but a want/need dichotomy is so far from original, I wonder if it still deserves its primacy in plotting manuals.

Other classic examples of ironic endings include a protagonist who:

· Gets what they want, only to find it wasn’t worth the getting (a variant on the positive ending).

· Doesn’t get what they want, but is glad about it due their transformation wrought by the story’s events (riffing on the negative ending).

· Realises they’ve thrown away the very thing/person that could have made them happy (see Othello above); a variant of which is,

· Realising they’ve rejected the person who could have been their friend/ally/true love in favour of someone who isn’t.

· Being destroyed by the person/thing they’ve set out to destroy.

· Discovering a deeply held belief is a lie.

· Discovering an ally is an enemy and vice versa,

Of these ironies, some lend themselves more obviously than others to twists and turning points before the final battle and/or resolution.

The false-ally-as-unknown-enemy is a well-worn device which could set up the climax of any sequence where the false ally betrays the protagonist, although, as with its inverse (enemy-turned-ally), it needs to be fairly deep into the story, with a convincing build up, to work dramatically. If we hadn’t been convinced Severus Snape was a death eater (spoiler alert) his sacrifice to save Harry Potter wouldn’t have been a shocking character revelation as well as significant plot action.

Discovering you’ve deeply believed in a lie would also need to have had profound negative consequences for the protagonist on the page before it would work as a meaningful epiphany, so that kind of ironic reveal might work best as a midpoint crisis or dark night of the soul.

More broadly, coming face-to-face with any cruel irony at the close of Act 2 could be the shocking revelation which precipitates the final crisis decision and climax in Act 3, including ‘getting what you want, only to find it wasn’t worth the getting’.

In that vein, I’m trying to remember the name of a 1950s romantic comedy where the hero got exactly what he wanted at the worst point/doom moment. His wedding was the point he realised that what he’d strived for all along (a rich wife) was a disaster because he'd fallen in love with a poor beauty. From memory, it might have been Tony Curtis marrying the rich woman when he’d fallen in love with a poor  Sophia Loren. Ring any bells? Anyway, I’m sure it’s been done since then, too.

And there must be a romance plot out there where Othello susses Iago at the last minute and stabs him, not Desdemona, and the couple lives happily-ever-after.

Being destroyed by the thing you set out to destroy sounds familiar from action stories. I’m thinking about a commander killed in action, whose death flips their battalion from defeatism to a commitment to win.

What about the protagonist who doesn’t get what they want, but is glad about it due the transformation wrought by the story’s events? Not sure how that can be anything other than an ending, but maybe with time its potential as a twist might become apparent.

Ironically, the more I write this blog the more I realise that nothing I’m saying here is original. Which is roughly where I am with the seventeenth century work-in-progress: at some point in the past fifteen years of writing and studying fiction, I’ve almost certainly come across the answer to every problem I’m having with its plot; it’s just a matter of tracking down the right answer.

Going back over old ABBA posts is about to become a habit.

Happy writing!

@HouseRowena on Twitter

Rowena House Author on Facebook

Website: rowenahouse.wordpress.com

Ye Nationale Curriculume By Steve Way

 

As well as writing I am teaching several adults in Spain English via the internet. A large portion of the 30 – 50-year-old students tend to be reluctant to speak in English. They’ve explained to me that in their generation at school (which they were grateful to attend as so many of their parents didn’t have that opportunity) the teaching of English was carried out by Spanish teachers, who were themselves reticent to speak in English. This meant that the focus of the lessons was almost exclusively directed towards the teaching of grammar. Some of my students can wipe me off the floor when it comes to identifying the multitude of verb forms in the passive tense, formal variations of conditional statements etc etc. They just need enormous support and encouragement in gaining confidence in expressing themselves verbally. Indeed, the agency I work with has been offering ‘conversation club’ sessions for the last few years where the participants are supported in just talking and listening in a ‘safe’ environment, rather than having ‘normal’ lessons. (Though our lessons don’t comprise endless exercises in grammar!) It has been very interesting to be involved with this process as I’ve seen many of the participants gain considerable confidence and skill from ‘just’ speaking and listening. I think it’s partly because the process is closer in form to the way we learn our first (or if we’re lucky first few) language(s). How many toddlers consciously delineate between their use of the present continuous or the past simple? They (we!) eventually work out how to do so and more besides without attending a single formal lesson in grammar.

The purpose behind outlining this experience with my students is that their learning represents what I see as another example of the consequences of an imbalanced approach to teaching. I think I’ve written before about referring to a heffalump to a few groups of children and being met with blank faced incomprehension. Having seen my grandson having to fiddle around with frontal adverbials in uninspiring exercises similar to those my Spanish friends no doubt endured, it continues to concern me that nowhere near enough time is set aside for children to read – or have read to them – complete stories, or to be able to write freely without having to worry about peppering their prose with ‘powerful’ adjectives, or having to compose while constantly looking over their shoulders for other reasons.

I wondered how a Shakespeare in a slightly different parallel universe would have coped with a common approach to themed writing, resulting in the piece below. Shakespeare’s imaginary teacher gained his own voice as I wrote it, so I do want to emphasise that his views, although perhaps historically accurate, are very much not the views of the author.

~~~~~

Dailie Reviewe

Straforde-upone-the-Avone Primarye Schoole fore Boyse.

Literacye Lessone.

This day I did ask the boys to write a story. I did give them much stimulus by explaining the history of the tragic Scottish king Macbeth. I did show them artefacts I had bought in, and we did then create a most magnificent piece of artwork that doth now adorn one whole wall of the school room that doth show the succession of the Scottish kings. We then weaved cloth of tartan and the children dressed as characters in the troubled history of this king and the children did role play exercises acting out imagined scenes in the life of this evil man, leading up to his killing of the previous King of Scotland, King Duncan. In this, as he hath done before in role play, young Williame Shakespearee did excel, taking on the role of the aforesaid Macbeth most brilliantly, suggesting a gradual moral decent that finally led to tragedy.

After all this stimulus I did then ask the boys to write their own versions of this story. I have to say that the results were most disappointing, even the unusual effort of the above mentioned Williame. I do declare most vociferously that I cannot understand it! I did give the boys all the stimulus herewith described and then did but remind the boys what they should be thinking of when’ere write.

As always I dids’t request them to recall that they must each moment consider the spelling of each word as they dos’t write their piece, forgetting not each rule of word construction that I hads’t aforetimes instructed them to do. Furthermore, I dids’t remind them to remember that every passing second they should be on guard to ensure their punctuation be perfectly and accurately executed. We did briefly run through the various perplexities of the use of full-stops, commas, apostrophes, colons, semi-colons, ellipses, capital letters, paragraphs, chapter headings and more besides though we had often aforetimes considered each in long and arduous detail.

Straight after did I then remind the boys, recalling to them their target of writing for this terme, to make copious use of “words of power” (whereof we do refer to adjectives) and thereof to on occasion present them in adjoining groups of three, a powerful impression upon the reader for to make; of the use of simple sentences, of short sentences and long, simile, metaphor, irony, pathos, bathos, pork-scratchings, rhetorical devices, implicit and explicit meaning (and much more besides).

Finally, did I review the need for a beginning that doth catch the attention of the reader, then the development of the plot that doth grow from the seed of the aforementioned appealing beginning, with many a problem being introduced into the text that doth by some absorbing means or contrivance have some resolution. Finally, I did further remind them - as I always do before allowing the boys to begin their writing - that the piece must be drawn to a most satisfying and edifying conclusion that will be much appreciated by the audience for which they doth write withal… which usually be just me. Naturally it then behove me, as night doth follow day, to ask the boys to consider, as they doth paint their plot, that they remember to develop the portrayal of the characters that they doth introduce as consequence of the story they expound but in doing so not forgetting to set the scenes of their narrative with many a diverting illustrative device.

So thus I had, methought, most excellently prepared the children for the task of writing. I cannot understand why all the boys but Williame produced not one line of entertaining or improving text and in Williame’s case he did in - contradiction of my instruction - write a most ill-formed play and not a story. As I told the boy myself while admonishing him before his fellows there had not been one mention of the supernatural in our preparatory work and yet this boy had incorporated witches and diverse unnatural beings, including ghosts, into his piece. Not only that his piece introduced the idea that Macbeth’s wife played a considerable role in stimulating the moral demise of this man, an propostion which is of course inconceivable, as though a woman could have equal status in a marriage as a man! Methought I would like to see how young master Shakespeare would portray the actions of this woman since women (rightly) be not allowed to perform in or even witness any play! Any form of developed narrative would of course quite overheat their simple minds… but I digress.

Young William did become much agitated as I most correctly did chastise him for writing such a poorly conceived composition. Verily, it is a tale told by an idiot I dids’t tell him, signifying but nought. Williame did then exclaim, “Forget writing then! I shall become a glovemaker!”  This was but the one part of our lesson that did please me, for we could do with another glovemaker in Straforde-upone-the-Avone and it doth not seem conceivable that master Shakespeare surrendering his pen for his needle will be much of a loss to posterity.

"Nothing will come of nothing." Or will it? - Anne Rooney

"Nothing will come of nothing: speak again." King Lear, I, i 

How wrong can you be? Of course, the whole play comes from this 'nothing'. If Cordelia had made some sycophantic speech as her sisters did, there would be no play. This line has a whole host of meanings, from this recursive reference to the play itself to contemporary science's struggle with the notion of a vacuum and the origin of all matter.

Modern science spends a good deal of effort explaining how everything comes from somewhere. Spontaneous generation — the notion that living things could spring from innanimate matter — was still accepted virtually without question in Shakespeare's day. 

Walking away from the generative mud

"Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile." (Antony and Cleopatra, II, vii)

Does that mean Shakespeare did believe 'something will come of nothing'? Of course he did. And we all do. Even though the molecules of Nile mud might rearrange themselves in to a crocodile, the something that is crocodilehood has to come from somewhere — something — that was not in the mud. (For Shakespeare and his western contemporaries, of course, it could come from God. But even if you buy into that, didn't he make everything ex nihilo? All from nothing?) Today, Big Bang theory still has everything coming from nothing. You might say that Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and 'let there be light' are the same idea differently phrased. But enough of cosmology. Back to crocodiles.

Current thinking has mud incapable of spawning crocodiles. Mud could furnish all the matter for a crocodile, but not actually generate a crocodile. Only another (two) crocodile(s) can do that. We could drift off into abiogenesis and the origins of life, but there is a closer-to-home and more urgent issue. Where does the crocodile-hood of a crocodile come from? What animates a crocodile that does not animate mud? (Assuming we follow the traditional line that mud is not animate.) And when?

I have a new grandson, born prematurely last month. He is small and sweet — very small, as premature babies generally are. When my daughter first told me about his impendingness I began thinking about two things. The first of ose two things was: where does the 'he' that animates him (assuming for convenience that he is binary) come from, and when? When does he become something other than the rearranged matter breathed in or eaten (and not thrown up) by his mother? When is a cell more than a cell? And then when does what will be his personality start and where does it come from? Even in NICU, the midwives discern character differences between babies. Even between babies who have never seen an unmasked human face — and there's a research project waiting to happen.

So far, so mundane. A million philosophers and anti-choicers have pondered the same questions with varying degrees of rigour. But the next question is 'where do our feelings for this new being come from?' Our terror and anxiety through the ups and downs of a perilous pregnancy and birth, and the love for this little person — these also seem to come from nowhere, nothing. We didn't have to eat more food to hope desperately for his survival. Indeed, we probably ate less. Chemical energy fuels the brain making the thoughts, yes, but it would have fueled different thoughts and feelings if there was no baby and it would not have taken different ingredients to do that. Where, in that ball of cells, can we locate the 'he' he will become (his crocodile-hood) but also the feelings we will have for him, and had already in smaller measure from the moment his existence was confirmed. Something comes of nothing. Our children and our love for our children come from nothing, yet if we lose them we are destroyed. Something so very powerful comes from nothing, and annihilates us — reduces us to nothing — if removed.

This might all sound as though it has nothing (hah!) to do with books, but it's everything to do with books. For one thing, he will grow into a future reader. Our readers are grown from nothing. For another, precisely the same question occurs to writers every day. We take a few thousand words and make something that is greater than the parts. Book-ness is an emergent property (like consciousness, or crocodile-hood). It comes from putting those particular words together in a particular order and context. The illustrations in a book are far more than the combination of coloured inks, of lines and shapes that makes them. The same is true of all other types of art, obviously, but this is a book blog. Yet the idea for a book, which might be sparked by an overheard conversation, a news story, a glimpse of something, or even have no apparent originating experience at all but 'come from nowhere' — that is also a nothing that becomes something. 

It's more than whole, emergent bookishness, too. Imagery creates something from nothing — from the rich gaps between words and their meanings. Images force us to bring things together, the more unexpected the better (within reason). How about this:

‘With fingers as hard as the handrail of a bus and just as cold’ – The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Hugh Alpin

Or this:

'...silent as a carpet' — Andy Stanton

Or even Emily Bell calling Elon Musk 'Space Karen'? 

And more potently:

'I have rape-colored skin' — Caroline Randall Williams. "You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument", New York Times

These all require us to bring a lot to our reading, to construct the meaning and resonance from what we already know and to make something entirely new out of the conjunction (or even collision). They all make something out of nothing. The something can be cataclysmic: reading or hearing something can change your life, or the destinies of whole hosts of people. It's why writing is so important and why rhetoric is a more potent weapon than a gun. (And so, presumably, why we don't teach rhetoric any more. I'm planning a book on rhetoric. It will be like The Anarchist Cookbook but for words.)

To conclude: Lear is supremely wrong. Not only was King Lear made out of nothing, the idea for the play was made from nothing, Shakespeare's own consciousness was made from nothing and the universe he lived in was made from nothing. Everything comes from nothing. 

Welcome, NanoB, with boundless love, to the confusing 'all' that comes from nothing.

Anne Rooney

Here's a book about all the shit that came from nothing:
Our Extreme Earth, Lonely Planet, 2020

 

Our Revels Now Are Ended... by Sheena Wilkinson

But I thought the bookish readers might like to hear about them. And maybe be inspired to do something similar.

 I love Shakespeare’s plays. Watching, reading, thinking about, and in my former career teaching*. I love his wealth of characters, his wildly inventive stories – not all original of course, his deep insights into the human psyche, and his language.

In 2017 some likeminded friends and I got together to share this love. We’d been in a Shakespeare reading group before, doing every single play over four years, and we missed it. Well, not  all of it. If I don’t read Troilus and Cressida again, that’s fine by me. 

So we set out to spend a year reading Shakespeare. We called it Twelve Plays In Twelve Months. There were eleven of us; perhaps twelve would have been neater. We met once a month in the home of our hosts, to eat and read. You don’t have to have dinner as well, but it does make it more festive, and the food usually tied in with the play – venison for As You Like It, haggis for Macbeth, etc., and we had great fun being inventive with puddings -- a strawberry pavlova to replicate the strawberry-spotted handkerchief in Othello; heart-shaped shortcake for Romeo And Juliet. 

We read the plays aloud, in full, as dramatized readings. Some of us were a little shy in January, but by March we were all giving it everything we had, safe in the knowledge that we were with friends who didn’t think it was weird, or pretentious, or boring, to want to read aloud some of the greatest literature ever written. 

How did we narrow it down to only twelve plays? Well, we chose personal favourites, and tried to have a representative sample of each type of play. We didn’t read Hamlet, because it takes too long, and of course we didn’t manage to include everyone’s favourite. We tried to fit the play to the month – Twelfth Night in January; Julius Caesar near the ‘ides of March’;  Macbeth close to Halloween, etc. Sometimes our reasoning was more pragmatic – we read King Lear in May because of the long and pleasant evenings; it might have been too depressing to read it in on a dark winter's night. We encouraged everyone to have the same text – we used the RSC Complete Works.

We were men and women – more women, inevitably at such gatherings. Some of us were, or had been, English teachers, but there was no real analysis of the plays – the reading was the thing. A couple of us were actors; others from different walks of life. Most of us were no more than acquaintances  at the start, except to one or two others, but there’s nothing like reading Juliet to a stranger’s Romeo to break down barriers.

It was great fun. It was a reminder to us all of how much we loved Shakespeare. In a crazy, difficult year, it was a little pinpoint of light every month, a getting together to do something beautiful, and traditional and enjoyable.So shines a good deed in a naughty world.  It was not very 2017. It took time. Even the shortest play takes several hours to read. You can’t rush Othello – and why would you want to? 

When we finished last week with The Tempest, we all felt a little sad, but joyful to have shared so many great plays. It’s so easy to organise: I’d encourage anyone who likes reading aloud to have a go. 

 Thank you, Mr Shakespeare!

---

* Not always an unalloyed joy, to be honest

SHAKESPEARE IN THE STREET by Sharon Tregenza

The high street of Corsham was a colourful sight on April the 23rd. The "Shakespeare Live" group staged a tribute to the bard on the 400th anniversary of his death.

They performed a kaleidoscope of popular pieces from Shakespeare to an appreciative audience.

I recognised bits from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. 

The local bookshop joined in the celebration with a Shakespeare themed quiz and window display.

And even the mother and child cafe got in on the act with free plastic ruffs for all. 

The sun shone, the audience laughed and clapped in all the right places and Corsham was a happy place to be.

More information about the Shakespeare Live group can be found here: www.shakespearelive.com

Sharon Tregenza

www.sharontregenza.com

Shakespeare The Shapeshifter by Steve Gladwin

On the day this blog comes out I have been invited to a wedding. I do not especially want to go as I hardly know the people involved, but it will I'm sure be a joyful occasion, made all the more so by the difficulties they have had to endure,before getting there What is fairly certain is that after a couple of hours of registry office and reception, people will know this couple – Pat and Tony, that bit better.

Life is full of times like this, when we do something new and end up adding to or enhancing our knowledge. It can be a new TV show or film, a new author as recommended by a friend, or taking that last minute, cut - price holiday offer.

We might think we know William Shakespeare as well, for we are constantly shown something new in reading or seeing his plays or in other’s interpretations of them. Of all writers, the poor old Bard has been messed about with more than most and yet always comes up not just smiling but relatively fresh and sometimes even a new kind of new. He can survive the attentions of Blackadder and the two lovey actors played so memorably by the late, great Kenneth Connor and Hugh Paddick, suffering the endless nose tweaking every time someone says the dreaded word ‘Macbeth’. (Sorry). 

Equally we can accept a pretty as a picture interpretation of Romeo and Juliet by Franco Zefirelli, with actors of more or less the right ages, and Baz Luhrmann’s great urban, street smart re-invention of 1988. I saw the latter in a small cinema in Burnham on Sea in Somerset. There were two teenagers behind us, who had only just removed their trainers from behind our heads. As the credits came on, one turned to his mate.

 ‘Ah, you ‘aven’t brought me to see ******** Shakespeare?

‘Yeh but see - after the first couple of minutes - you don’t notice.’’ 

And much to his mate's and even my surprise, you really didn’t. Around that time we were touring R and J for Key Stage 3 in local secondary schools and what chance do you have with your plastic looking knives when most of them have just seen that?
.

Around the same time at an evening performance of the Scottish Play at Bridgwater Arts Centre, I was surprised to see crowds of Years 5 and 6 and their teachers milling around in excitement, waiting for the performance by Cheek by Jowl to begin. But why should I be surprised? At that time I simply hadn’t got it – the fact that anyone can appreciate Shakespeare and no-one can really put their finger on why. To some people its the language - which, we are so often led to assume, he must have crafted so carefully and thoughtfully - so surely it must only be spoken in a suitably beautiful way? Except of course that he couldn't have done, because more than anything he was a jobbing actor, a sharer in first The Lord Chamberlain and later The Kings Men. The scene at the beginning of Olivier’s tub thumping film of Henry the Fifth - where we see a most convincing wooden ‘O’, and the deliberate tripping up of the poor bloke playing the archbishop - or the opening scene of Shakespeare In Love where Geoffrey Rush as Henslowe has his feet toasted by an impatient Tom Wilkinson are probably all too authentic.

Henry Fuseli's uniquely eerie take on Mr and Mrs Scottish Play

Somehow we still convince ourselves that we are seeing is in some way Shakespeare as it would have been performed, which of course is so much nonsense. There is the absence of boy actors alone, or that what we see nowadays is mostly lovingly detailed and imagined rather than the simple representation of the times, more’ two planks and a passion’, than high art. We may gasp and cry for poor drowned Ophelia or the deeply disturbed Lady Scottish Play, but we forget that audience responses in the 16^th and 17^th centuries would be more like pantomime. Returning kings were cheered, villains were hissed and with poor Ophelia it would be more a case of ‘look at ‘er – poor cow.’

In their own way however, every member of that audience would have cared what he or she saw during that ‘two hour traffic of our stage’ and even sometimes have gone away just a bit changed. It will be equally so at this wedding where two characters who I hardly know, will - for a few hours - be the leading lights on this particular stage. Shakespeare understood this and he did it better than anyone.

Last year I did a ten week online Shakespeare course with Professor Jonathan Bate and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. I lasted nine and a bit weeks before I got learner overkill and bowed out. It wasn’t Shakespeare I grew bored with, but the other online learners analysing every nuance and in several cases setting themselves up as experts with their own merry bands of followers. I enjoyed the course, but mostly it was because of the plays I read, some for the first time, (oh all right, maybe not Anthony and Cleo which Morecambe and Wise and Glenda Jackson did far better!). The others I  
hadn’t read – The Merchant of Venice and The Merry Wives of Windsor - I enjoyed thoroughly and would read again. Above all I responded - as so many people did - to the stories in the plays and the story of the man who wrote them.

And maybe that sums up Shakespeare! He may be a shape-shifter - able to survive any amount of ‘mucking about with’ - but he is also first and foremost a storyteller and boy did he know how to do it. His stuff isn’t all about kings, and queens and lords and ladies. As Jonathan Bate himself says in his revealing book The Genius Of Shakespeare, one of many facts which makes nonsense of the ‘Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford/Christopher Marlowe, who wasn’t really dead/a lot of monkeys with typewriters/my granny, debate, is that he so clearly spoke not just for the common man or woman, (which he certainly did), but for the ordinary life and experience as much as the extraordinary one.. Shakespeare often wrote about a Pat and a Tony and helped us to know them better. 

Emma Rice, courtesy of www.kneehigh.co.uk

After all it is a wonderful time for us Shakespeare fans - what with all the plans the good old Beeb, (leave it alone - it's fine as it is!) - has for the Bard's birthday. More exciting for me is the appointment of Emma Rice, former director of Kneehigh Theatre Company as the new director of The Globe. Emma directed and starred in the best piece of theatre I have ever seen, Theatre Alibi's "Sea of Faces', which I saw at Bridgwater Arts Centre in 1997. It was based on the finding of a collection of old family photos on a rubbish heap. Out of these lost faces Emma and Dan Jamieson created the most wonderful magical and often tender two hander which brought all of these lost people back to life.
Shakespeare made us care too and most of the time he ensures that a character - whether they be a king and queen or a Pat and Tony - is never just a 'face'. That is one of the reasons I'm happy to raise a glass not just to Pat and Tony, but to the man who would surely have appreciated their story. 

New Globe Theatre director Emma Rice on her first season and a whole lot more.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jan/05/shakespeares-globe-emma-rice-if-anybody-bended-gender 

I found Shakespeare again on Future Learn, where you can find a whole lot more besides

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses

Where Angels Fear to Tread by Keren David

I took O Level English Literature at a girls' grammar school in 1979. We studied three texts: Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford; E M Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Midsummer's

Night's Dream.  A play by the ultimate English writer, and two texts connected only by their utter Englishness.
I found the detailed social history contained in Flora Thompson's memoir of life in rural England completely tedious. Forster's examination of Edwardian snobbery and xenophobia in Forster's novel was somewhat baffling, sixteen-year-old girls not being best placed to appreciate a story about a middle-aged* woman's lust for a younger man (Eeeuw, yuck, disgusting). Re-reading it, 35 years later I was surprised to find it laugh-out-loud funny.
 I didn't enjoy English Literature O level, but I was good at it, and that was why I continued on to A level, which I found much more rewarding, with its wider (but still 100% English...not even British) texts.
Around the same time my husband received a reading list from his school. It included 22 plays, including contemporary works (Arnold Wesker's Roots, Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey), four plays by George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and Sophocles' Antigone.  For W Shakespeare the list read 'Any Play'.
The list for prose was longer -  44 books. They included plenty of nineteenth century novels: Jane Austen, Brontes C and E, two novels by Dickens and one by Hardy.
There were many twentieth century texts, British, American and translated : Anne Frank's Diary; Of Mice and Men (and another Steinbeck), To Kill a Mocking Bird. George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984; Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice and The Pied Piper, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, D H Lawrence Sons and Lovers.
The list covered many genres -  science fiction (Day of the Triffids); romance (Pride and Prejudice); historical fiction (Rosemay Sutcliff's Warrior Scarlet); memoir( Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals), dystopian fiction (Fahrenheit 451); mystery (Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair) a western (Shane by Jack Shaefer) and a thriller (Alistair McLean's The Guns of Navarone).  There were several true-life stories from the Second World War, one by a Polish writer, one by an Italian and Alan Burgess's novel A Small Woman about a British missionary in China.
This list was clearly designed to be as broad as possible, introducing pupils to classic works of literature and inviting them to find out what sort of book they enjoy. It was challenging, interesting, reflecting different social classes and nationalities, as well as ethnic minority groups.
Should schools find this extensive list too short, there was a note: 'Candidates from Schools whose extended lists have been approved by the Board may, of course, refer in addition to texts on these lists.'  My husband remembers that pupils were told to read at least five or six of the 66 texts on the list, but he read at least 20, some in class, some from the local library. The final examination at the end of the course asked generic questions such as: 'Write about strong characters in some of the books you have read.'
This list  fostered a love of  reading in my husband which eventually led him to read English Literature at Oxford University.
The really interesting thing is that he was taking CSE English at a Secondary Modern school, a school to which he had been condemned by failing the 11 plus. CSEs were widely seen as useless qualifications for thickies, but I would contend that anyone who was given that list and had a crack at reading six books on it, would find something  enjoyable and challenging to read which might inspire them to read more in the future.

Our daughter took GCSE English recently, studying anthologies of poetry and short stories, a few scenes from Macbeth and Of Mice and Men; a syllabus which seemed to be designed for kids with short concentration spans. Of Mice and Men was the only text she read that ran to any length at all - all 107 pages of it. I have nothing against Steinbeck's classic, and certainly nothing against Macbeth, I am sure that the anthologies contained good material, but I have to admit to a great deal of parental frustration as I watched my daughter thoroughly turned off by this thin fare, and irritated by being asked to compare World War One poetry with Macbeth, an exam question that she found pointless and off-putting. .
I am writing this, of course, because of the recent kerfuffle over GCSE English, a row in which facts got lost to prejudice (for and against Michael Gove, for and against American literature, for and against Dickens and other nineteenth century authors).
Depending on who you read, Gove had personally interfered to ban books, or had bravely intervened to widen the curriculum, or Gove had nothing to do with any of it. As the saying goes, fools rush in, where angels fear to tread: it seemed as though the way the changes to GCSE English were reported and discussed was designed to make everyone look foolish (a Machiavellian plot by Gove himself, perhaps?)
I watched the row develop with increasing frustration, as it had so little to do with the actual crisis facing British children's literacy. Libraries are closing! Schools are being designed without libraries! Reading is being re-defined as deciphering phonics! School library services are closing! Children are spending more and more time glued to screens and less and less time reading for pleasure! These are the real crises, not whether Of Mice and Men remains on the school syllabus.
 When I read that Bailey's Prize winner Eimear McBride wants to spend some of her £30,000 prize money buying copies of Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird to give free to teenagers, I want to scream. These books haven't been banned, Eimear! Schools have so many copies that they will, no doubt, find a way of using them, perhaps by teaching them to Y9 pupils.  Instead, please give your money to the Siobhan Dowd Trust which has the simple and essential aim of promoting the love of reading among disadvantaged children and young adults.
Yesterday the review section of The Guardian newspaper asked a select group of authors and academics to pick GCSE texts (no librarians, English teachers or children's writers among them). The choice that make me giggle the most was put forward by Linda Grant: Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth. And the one with which I agreed  whole-heartedly was Hilary Mantel:
Should we play the Gove game, by setting up opposing lists? Or should we ask, which Gradgrind thought up the idea of set texts in the first place? Why should students be condemned to thrash to death a novel or a corpus of poetry, week after week, month after month? No novel was ever penned to puzzle and punish the young. Plays are meant to be played at. Poetry is not written for Paxmanites. Literature is a creative discipline, not just for writer but for reader. Is the exam hall its correct context? We educate our children not as if we love them but as if we need to control and coerce them, bullying them over obstacles and drilling them like squaddies; and even the most inspired and loving teachers have to serve the system. We have laws against physical abuse. We can try to legislate against emotional abuse. So why do we think it's fine to abuse the imagination, and on an industrial scale? What would serve children is a love of reading, and the habit of it. I wonder if the present system creates either.



*As a 16 year old I definitely saw Lilia as middle-aged and her love for a 21-year-old made me queasy. On re-reading I discovered she was only 33.

All the World's A Stage - Anna Wilson

I have been thinking a lot recently about the importance of drama in English teaching. It was reading Polly Toynbee in the Guardian a few weeks back which sparked off this particular train of thought. The thrust of her article was about what the delightful Mr Gove plans for the future of our children's education, but about halfway in she makes specific points about the value of drama in schools.

'Gove pretends it's for schools to choose – but drama, dance, art and now literature will slip away. Confident top schools may keep these subjects, but average schools, under intense pressure to perform in core EBacc exams, will let the rest slide.'

It is easy to see how, facing such pressures, schools may be forced to relegate drama to 'club' status rather than keeping it in with the main-stream timetable. But what a shortsighted view. Drama is invaluable to a child's development - indeed, I would go so far as to say it is a natural part of a child's development and surely a step on the way to producing a confident reader.

Sit and watch a young child at play, and what is he or she doing if not acting out stories? Play is drama for the young child. It is how he or she explores the world around, tries out different scenarios, puts him or herself in another's shoes. And it is intrinsically bound up with storytelling.

When I go into schools to talk about writing, I do a lot of 'acting out' of the various scenes in my life which have wound their way into stories. I could simply stand in front of a school assembly and tell them 'this happened, and then this and then this', but in acting out how my tortoise must have felt when my dad glued a length of fishing line to its shell to 'stop it escaping', I think the story has more impact than my simply telling it. It allows the audience to put themselves in the place of the poor tortoise who had no say in my dad's crazy plan. And it makes the kids laugh. And remember my talk. One teacher emailed me after an event to tell me that the children were acting out my stories in the playground later that day.

Toynbee again:

'What is "low value" about drama? […] Ability to speak out, perform and pretend is essential for most jobs, from estate agent upwards. Employers complain that young people mumble, slouch and don't look them in the eye, prizing the "soft skills" that elite schools teach through drama and debating. Emotionally, drama teaches children lacking in empathy to put themselves into others' shoes, to express fears. But ever fewer schools employ specialist drama teachers: English teachers may or may not have an aptitude. Shakespeare is on the curriculum, no longer to be examined, but dead on the page without performance to breathe life and sense into it.'

'Dead on the page'. Is this how we want future generations to think of writing? Boring, dull, immovable, immutable shapes on the page? That was my own experience as a pupil in an old-fashioned grammar school, whose teaching methods had not changed since the 1950s; a decade Gove so keenly looks back to as a model for future generations' education.

We studied Macbeth for two years in the run-up to O-level English and he and the rest of the cast remained mummified on the page for me to the point where I gave up reading and dropped English like a hot potato as soon as I could. How differently I would have felt had I had the teacher my son had four years ago - a woman who is as passionate about drama as she is about reading and writing, and who had my son dress up as one of the witches and learn the cauldron scene in Act 4, scene 1 with his friends. He was only eight years old at the time, but he understood Macbeth's motivations and emotions so much better than I did at twice his age.

So drama is a 'soft skill' is it? I would argue that Gove might do a lot better in his own line of work if he went along to a couple of plays or even took part in one. He might at least learn a bit of empathy, if nothing else. Or is that wishful thinking?

Anna Wilson
www.annawilson.co.uk