‘The Bogey of the Schoolroom’

Abstract

‘Why should Shakespeare be employed in schools as a spelling book or reading book?’ (Mantz and Murry, 1933, 195). In February 1904 this was the passionate line of argument advanced by Katherine Mansfield, then Kathleen Beauchamp, at a school debate. Resisting a seemingly routine and stagnant immersion in prescribed texts, Mansfield declared that ‘the very idea of being forced to learn Shakespeare deadens the sense of the appreciation of the beautiful’ (Mantz and Murry, 1933, 194). The decadent aesthetic expressed here by the adolescent ‘little Colonial’ hints at a heavy-handed institutionalism detrimental to creativity. It furthermore invites consideration of how the nexus of standardised pedagogic practices and significant personal experiences might have contributed to authorial incorporations of Shakespeare, in this case in New Zealand. In this essay I will examine the context of education in the British Empire, and how early exposure to Shakespearean pedagogy was experienced by Mansfield and the producer/detective writer Ngaio Marsh; and — more particularly — how such experience was transformed in fiction by the novelist Janet Frame. An examination of school anthologies questions how far these writers might have been influenced by the early twentieth century practices of colonial education through which they first encountered Shakespeare — an introduction that was, in Marsh’s phrase, ‘a present I value more than any other’ (Marsh, 1966, 488; see also Houlahan, 2005).