English A-Levels at the Shakespeare Festival in Neuss

„Shakespeare is like sex!“ That is how David Spottiswood started his performance and immediately caught the attention of the audience.
On 21st June Mrs Matner’s English LK went to “Shakespeare and the Globe” to listen to the educational director of the London Globe, Shakespeare’s theatre at the time. With a great sense of humour Spottiswood managed not only to make the audience laugh but also to get across the greatness of William Shakespeare and his popular plays.
It is not a big secret that the news of having to read Shakespeare does not always awake great enthusiasm in the “Leistungskurs”. All this old language and complicated actions ... However, David Spottiswood really succeeded in drawing our interest to the world-famous author. He compared e.g. Shakespeare’s sonnets with SMS today and pointed out the exception of one of the sonnets in “Romeo and Juliet” as the “two lovers had been finishing each other’s verses” which was very unusual during “the bard’s life time”. What would have been an hour of studying in class, he simply put in a nutshell: “they were getting into each other’s pentametres”.
To explain the complicated character constellation in “Midsummer Night’s Dream” David Spottiswood took five students out of the audience and brought them on stage. Two of them were from our class which made us enjoy the performance even more: “A boy, playing a woman, playing a boy” suddenly made sense as he let the students perform a little roleplay with Paul from our class as the “hottest bachelor” in town.
After a short break the educational director of the London Globe came to speak about the development of the English language. With humour he criticised the English language before Shakespeare. With its short words he characterised it even as a “dumb language”. But then there was Shakespeare who increased the English vocabulary enormously by adopting sophisticated words from Latin and Greek. When the Bible had 7000 different words at the time, in Shakespeare’s works 27.000 words can be found. “So Shakespeare knew more words than God” joked Spottiswood and finished his great performance.
(Julia Heister)