Work hard, be kind, take responsibility – those instructions are written all over the school and I have some things to say about them that I’ll come back to – first to let you know about one of my projects last year which was to learn the list of Shakespeare’s plays and have something intelligent to say about each one. I imagine you’re all working on something similar – lists of things to be memorised with something intelligent to say – so I have three pieces of advice for committing things to memory.
To this end I’ve taken the traditional categories of tragedy, history and comedy and decided that there are 9 of each which has left me five problem plays and six late romances to have as additional groups. Within each set of nine they break down nicely into two sets of four and a one – the comedies, for example, have a set of four early comedies in which Shakespeare was still developing his craft but which you’ll seldom see performed; four great comedies that will never go out of fashion and what I call a potboiler – a play that isn’t great but was hugely popular with audiences at the time and will have enabled Shakespeare to make rent and keep food in the pot whilst he moved on with being brilliant.
We don’t, unfortunately, have time to go through all thirty eight plays, or even all nine comedies today – your time is precious – and so we are just going to be able to take a brief look at my favourite: As You Like It. This story is set in the forest of Arden where the rightful Duke and his court are hiding having been exiled by a usurper, the duke’s brother who has stolen the crown. The love interest is provided by Rosalind and Orlando. Rosalind is the daughter of the duke and one of Shakespeare’s greatest female roles, and Orlando is, at least at the start of the play, so utterly hapless that he spends his time writing love poetry and pinning it to thorn bushes to attract Rosalind. It doesn’t work.
The best-known lines are performed by melancholy Jacques, a member of the Duke’s court with a gloomy disposition and a sarcastic streak a mile wide. They go like this:
All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow…
There are four more ages to run through but I’m going to pause there because you’re time is precious and there are two ideas in this speech that I think are relevant to you here today. The first is a question. Are you a whining schoolboy? It seems a bit harsh, and I hope that you are all thinking to yourselves “Obviously not – maybe a little bit when I was in year 11, but definitely not now.”
The seven ages of man is a speech that goes through the human life and to Shakespeare the actor and playwright, the interesting parts were the roles that were played: the infant, the schoolboy, the lover and then onto the soldier, the justice, the pantaloon and the second childishness. To me as a teacher, however, the interesting parts are the transitions and I think that some of you have not completely emerged from your shells, that there is still a snail-like quality about how you approach your studies.
Lower down the school it might have been acceptable to come in reluctantly, dragging your heels, to do the minimum you could get away with, to see it as the teachers’ job to make you learn, to think that you were engaged in unpaid labour for the benefit of those teachers or for your family. That doesn’t stack up any more – you’re not whining schoolboys, you’re Year 13s with less than four months to your exams, with plans for your next steps and the grades you need to secure them, with your own hopes and dreams. It’s not even unpaid – government figures say that every day of schooling adds £750 to lifetime earnings which future you will enjoy having.
So what does this mean? Lots of things – growing up is complicated – but for this morning just three pieces of advice to take away:
Are you a whining schoolboy? Not any more.
The second point I want to drag out of this speech is that all the world’s a stage and the men and women are merely players – let’s just pause a moment and enjoy the irony of an actor turning to the audience and saying that whilst gesturing to the painted forest and costumed colleagues, daring them to drop their suspension of disbelief, to remember that Jacques only exists within the world of the stage. We think of breaking the fourth wall as a modern affectation – you may have seen Miranda engage extensively in the practice – but here’s Shakespeare doing perhaps the more impressive thing of pushing the fourth wall as far as it will bend without breaking.
All the world’s a stage so what can we learn from the world of the theatre? Well, I’d like to take you to the dress rehearsal and the proverb that a bad dress rehearsal leads to a good first night. Like a lot of proverbs this is partly nonsense but hides within it a grain of truth. The nonsense is displayed by a whole host of truly terrible plays where the dress rehearsal should have been a sign of what was to come – the actors weren’t properly rehearsed, lines weren’t learned, entries and exits bungled. Maybe they thought they’d see what would happen if they didn’t make the effort and then had too little time to do anything about it. Whatever the reason, those plays don’t make it onto the west end; those actors don’t make it to Hollywood.
The grain of truth comes from when you see a dress rehearsal with actors who have done their best, with a team that is focused on delivering an amazing performance. To an outsider the rehearsal looks like it’s gone fine but the actors and the director know the bits that weren’t exactly how they should be, the timing that was just off, the wordplay that doesn’t quite land, that time they pushed the fourth wall one inch too far. It’s not actually a bad dress rehearsal – but it is one that creates a long list of things that can be improved. There are two reasons why this points to a great first night: because most of it’s so good, it means the little mistakes show up, can be identified, fixed; and because the team did a really good job there isn’t really too much to work on – there’s enough time to do the fixing.
You are heading for your dress rehearsal, just a few weeks away from your final mocks and that means you have in your hands the choice of which kind of bad dress rehearsal you’re aiming for. I have heard students in the past explain to me that they mocks went badly because they didn’t try hard – they wanted to see how well they would do without trying. I say students, but really they were just smartly dressed snails. It’s a daft experiment because we know what the outcome will be – if you don’t work for them the exams will go badly and you won’t have learned anything else. If, on the other hand, you treat these as though they were the real thing – get yourself as ready as possible and prepare with all the energy and enthusiasm that you plan to apply to your final exams – well, then you’ll find out which bits you don’t really know, which areas to focus on in the last few weeks, which tweaks and changes you need to make and, even better, you’ll have time to do the fixing. Remember, your time is precious!
I have again three pieces of advice
Nine pieces of advice in three sets of three: 1) You can learn a lot if you 2) break it into chunks and 3) use tricks like everything being in sets of three. Second set: 1) be on time 2) be enthusiastic and 3) commit to your own future; and a final set 1) work hard 2) do hard work 3) look after yourself.
All the world’s a stage and the men and women are merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and each man in his time plays many parts. Work hard, be kind, take responsibility.
Footnotes
1. The idea of hard work is further explored in Hard Work on Electric Avenue
2. This Orlando has not previously appeared (despite his haplessness), but another literary figure of the same name turned up in Finite Things