TREND / PLAYING THE BARD : All the Classroom’s a Stage for Lessons on Shakespeare : Folger Library gives teachers a cue on how to get high school students in on the act.

If their kids could see them now: a score of high school teachers of English slashing at each other with long dowel sticks on the lawn of the usually sedate Folger Shakespeare Library.

“When do we get to die?” calls out one awkward battler in retreat. A teacher, looking forlorn, carries her broken stick to the fencing instructor, Michael Tolaydo, the artistic director of the Maryland Shakespeare Festival. “Teacher,” she says in mock lament, “I broke my sword.” He smiles and hands her a replacement.

Tolaydo then shows the teachers how to rain blows on each other with their fists, how to simulate pain and might. “With kids,” he goes on, “you give them a whole bunch of match sticks. When they get hit, yurrrrup. “ He fakes spitting out match sticks like broken teeth. “They love it.”

The recent shenanigans at the Folger--the world’s most extensive and hallowed depository of books by and about William Shakespeare--were far from a lark. The teachers were slashing and smashing at each other as part of a Folger program offering new techniques in teaching Shakespeare. These antics reflect the power of two American phenomena: the persistent fascination with Shakespeare throughout American history and the recent revolution in the way many American teachers now teach his plays.

Shakespeare, in fact, is probably more popular in the United States than in his native England. “In America, almost every high school student has read one or two plays by Shakespeare,” said Tony Hill, director of education for Britain’s famed Royal Shakespeare Company. “That is not true in Britain.”

And yet, the works of Shakespeare are too often treated in American schools as a forbidding text that can only be deciphered with eye-squinting footnotes, as a dreaded store of formidable and boring exercises to memorize.

To free Shakespeare, the Folger Library’s staff and many educators have been campaigning to move him from the textbook to a makeshift stage in every classroom, to encourage children to understand Shakespeare by acting him out. For seven years, the library has invited small groups of high school teachers for summer courses in new techniques of presenting plays to pupils.

“I think the best way to learn Shakespeare is for kids to get up and do it,” Peggy O’Brien, the director of the Folger’s education department, told the teachers. “So we get goofy things like seventh-grade kids dressed in bedsheets and Nikes acting as Romans. But it’s great. It’s his words in their mouths.”

Shakespeare has long been popular in America. He was first venerated by the Establishment as the preeminent poet in the English language. Thomas Jefferson, outlining the proper education for young lawyers in the 18th Century, urged them to study Shakespeare night and day. He and John Adams visited Shakespeare’s birthplace in 1786 and chipped a piece off one of his chairs for a souvenir.

Under the influence of Shakespeare admirer Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Clay Folger, president and chairman of Standard Oil, assembled the world’s largest collection of rare editions of Shakespeare’s works and then built the Folger Library for them, a marble building that fits easily into the assembly of houses of government on Capitol Hill.

In its educational program this year, mostly funded by a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Library combined its resources with those of Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company for the first time. As a result, 15 British high school teachers joined 25 American high school teachers in the month of studies at Stratford-on-Avon in England and at the Folger Library in Washington. The teachers studied acting techniques, curriculum development and text analysis and watched performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

But the teachers probably gained the greatest insight into teaching Shakespeare by acting out the plays. Susan Carol Ledford of Flathead High School in Kalispell, Mont., who had taken the part of Lord Capulet in a makeshift performance of “Romeo and Juliet,” said: “When I see a play of Shakespeare now, I see it in a whole new way.”

O’Brien, who started out as a high school teacher of English two decades ago and joined the Folger staff in 1981, believes Ledford’s pupils will see it in a whole new way as well. “There’s an affinity between Shakespeare and kids,” she said, because children can relate to his language when spoken aloud. “Kids can memorize rap in 10 minutes,” she said. “The key for the kids to make the connection with Shakespeare is to put his words in their mouths.

“Teachers have been acting out Shakespeare for years,” O’Brien added. “I didn’t invent the idea. Shakespeare did.”