Biography of Walter Saunders
Walter Saunders is a poet and a painter who was a teacher of English for forty years. Shakespeare has always been his main interest. He has directed more than twenty Shakespeare productions in schools - mostly with 11 to 13 year olds at a small primary school called King's in the Natal Midlands.
Walter's great aim is to make all people, young and old, share his enjoyment and love of Shakespeare. What impedes this enjoyment is the difficulty most people have in understanding Shakespeare's old fashioned language. Year after year new texts come out with explanatory notes and other aids to understanding, which go part of the way towards solving the problem but only part. Walter has found a solution that really works in the classroom and on the stage. Keeping as far as possible to the spirit and the poetry of the originals, he has rewritten the plays in the English people speak today. So the lines come across immediately without the need to look up footnotes and dictionaries or to struggle in other ways to arrive at their meaning. The experience becomes altogether interesting and enjoyable. And what Walter has discovered in follow-up research is that those who use the modernisations as a basis for study not only enjoy the experience more but have and retain a better knowledge of the plays.
In 1991 Walter retired as Professor of English at the University of Bophuthatswana in South Africa in order to concentrate on the modernisations. He now lives with his wife Vivien in Normandy, France. They have a large farmhouse surrounded by cornfields in the gentle country between Bayeux and Caen. Walter is currently working on Hamlet which will be the next play to be published in the Shakespeare2000 series.