In other words: don’t study anything you will not enjoy. 

And yet, despite the groans of students throughout the English-speaking world, schools continue to place a high value on work by the Elizabethan bard. 

Saturday marks 400 years since the death of Shakespeare, whose plays and poems are on the text list of all seven Bendigo secondary schools the Advertiser contacted.

Bendigo South East College head of English Trish Di Donato has a mission for no student to leave her school without being exposed to Shakespeare’s work. 

She said the bard was critical to understanding the human condition.

“For example, when we are discussing Hamlet and his grief, we can still relate to aspects of that today,” she said. 

The same sentiment was shared by Catholic College Bendigo English head Kate Watts, whose school places such a high value on the bard’s body of work it awards an annual Shakespeare Shield to the student with the best essay about his plays.   

“The themes that are in the plays, especially in Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, they're universal: love, fate, power, leadership, betrayal,” she said.

“Although he wrote in the 16^th century, these things haven't changed.” 

Unsurprisingly, the play taught most frequently in the city’s schools is Romeo and Juliet, a script Victory Christian College teacher Sally Spark calls “the stock standard year 10 introduction to Shakespeare”.

But while girls were won over by the play’s romance, she said teenage boys were harder to impress, so her classes focus on its elements of tragedy and comedy.

Splitting into two sides, students reenact the rivalry between warring Montague and Capulet clans, even firing upon each other with nerf guns. 

“If they've got props and costumes, and if they're having a giggle and a laugh, then they enjoy it,” she said.  

Bell Shakespeare associate director James Evans, whose theatre company performs Elizabethan plays around Australia to students and adult audience, said the playwright’s language came alive on the stage.

He approved of Romeo and Juliet as an entryway into Shakespeare, but cautioned teachers to avoid making their classes read the play like it was a book. 

“These aren’t novels, they’re plays,” he said.

“They should be getting up and experiencing what its like.”

He said his company’s productions had not only broken down the barrier to understanding old-fashioned language, but even inspired some students to pursue a performing career.

“What we do is give the kids a visceral and an emotional experience of the play, not just the dry and academic versions,” he said.

Crusoe College English head Sharon Marchingo said she relied on visual versions of Shakespeare, like Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet, to win over her class.

But she said it was not just students struggling with Shakespeare, explaining some teachers were also daunted by the teaching his work. 

“There is a genuine fear with teachers,” she said. 

“They think its too difficult and they don’t feel they’re qualified.”

La Trobe University education department academic Dr Debra Edwards said teachers’ fear stemmed from their own negative experiences of studying the texts. 

She said teacher training at the Bendigo campus ensured future educators were exposed to resources that broke down difficult texts like Shakespearean plays.  

“Understanding how to introduce the text, how to orientate students to the text, is easier now there’s a vast range of resources out there,” she said, including contemporary interpretations like the film 10 Things I Hate About You, which is a modern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. 

These are important lessons for staff to learn if Ms Di Donato is right in her assumption that Shakespeare will always feature on English students’ book lists. 

“I can’t see an end to it,” she said. “And that’s great.” 

“The students love bringing it alive. They understand it.”