Learning to speak Shakespeare like the actors do

How standing up and reading Shakespeare out loud can make it more fun and understandable for teenagers.

Between them Stacey, 14, and Maleeha, 13, speak six languages - now they both speak Shakespeare as well.

That's just as well, as the work of the 16th Century dramatist and poet forms as much as a quarter of the marks for some English GCSEs.

To do well in this key exam, in which the results are crucial to schools, pupils need to become comfortable with the complex poetry of Elizabethan England.

Beautiful though it may be, the language does not sit easily with the staccato, text-speak and Instagram posts of today's modern teenager.

And one might assume it would be harder for pupils who speak languages other than English at home.

These pupils from Barking - a culturally diverse part of east London - were not always so fluent with the Bard.

"When I first saw it.. Shakespeare I mean... I didn't really want to read it," says Stacey.

But the Year 9 pupil describes how she was given a kind of "code" to the language, along with her classmates at Eastbury Community School.

As one of the Royal Shakespeare Company's associate schools, pupils were helped by a specialist from the theatre company's education programme.

She worked with the class, helping pupils to unlock the language using tried and tested techniques.

'Now willing'

Rather than sitting at desks, books open, pupils are taught to read the texts in the same way as actors do in rehearsals; on their feet, and from punctuation mark to punctuation mark.

Pupils are encouraged to get inside the minds of the characters, to see how they fit together with others in the jigsaw of the play.

They also get to see an RSC performance.

"I began to understand. It was like I had the code," Stacey said. "So when I went on to another play, I felt quite well informed because it was the same. I could break it down, see how it fits together and try to make sense of it.

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