Education Quote by Antony Sher

Sher is puncturing a polite myth: that Shakespeare is a kind of prestige documentary with iambic pentameter. Coming from an RSC stalwart who made a career inside the temple, the line lands as both confession and corrective. He’s not dismissing the plays; he’s demoting “accuracy” from the list of what they’re for.

The specific intent is to recalibrate how audiences and institutions talk about Shakespeare’s histories. We keep treating Richard III or Henry V as national curriculum, a clean pipeline from stage to “what happened.” Sher reminds us the pipeline is propaganda-adjacent: Shakespeare’s history is history bent into story, shaped by the needs of performance, Tudor politics, and a crowd that paid to be moved, not footnoted.

Subtext: theater teaches you to feel how malleable truth becomes once it has to work in a room. Actors live in the gap between record and role. Sher’s “basic resemblance” is a dry understatement that carries professional authority: if you’ve spent decades making these kings breathe, you also learn how invented they are. The insight isn’t scholarly; it’s practical. Shakespeare compresses timelines, sharpens villains, invents motives, turns messy power struggles into clean moral weather because drama demands legibility.

Context matters. Sher worked in a cultural ecosystem where Shakespeare is often treated as heritage product, a safe proxy for English identity. His warning is quietly political: when we consume these plays as history, we inherit their biases as “truth.” The line invites a more adult relationship with canon: admire the craft, question the narrative, stop outsourcing your past to the most quotable version.