6th-Grade Puppeteers Meet Master Shakespeare

~by Susan Lucille Davis

Some decades ago, the little girl I used to be sat on her bed and listened intently, enthralled by the words that came from her sister’s mouth as she read her homework aloud.  “Double, double, toil and trouble…” Listening to the magic of those words ultimately led me to become a writer, a reader, and a teacher. So, when I encounter adults who think Shakespeare is too hard for kids, I am mystified. Wouldn’t the magical words of Shakespeare’s plays and poems capture the imagination of any child if presented in the right way?

This year, I tested my theory with my 6^th-graders as we read A Midsummer Night’s Dream together. Just as I do when I teach older students, I started out with a bit of “Shakespeare Therapy,” where we hash out our fears and concerns about taking on such a daunting project. I shared my own difficulties with learning foreign languages as a pre-curser to asking my students to wrestle with Shakespeare’s peculiar brand of English. And this time I offered a challenge that would turn out to make all the difference in my students’ motivation to learn: We would create a puppet show for the entire school based on scenes from the play.

As we began to read the play in class, using the Folger’s Shakespeare Set Free as a guide, I overheard students muttering comments like “That’s my puppet!” as each character was introduced. Their interest in each character’s development was sparked from the beginning – and my gender-blind assignments even drew in boys who were given Titania or the young female lovers’ characters, for instance. Students “previewed” the play at night (reading for as much understanding as they could muster, but not worrying about getting it all), and we worked out the staging as we read each scene during the day.  My students were hooked!

Meanwhile, their puppets were coming along in Art class, as they added leaves to Puck and learned how to fashion a hairdo for Hippolyta. One student asked, “Do I need to make a donkey mask for Bottom?” I asked her to go back to the play and find where Bottom’s “translation” occurs. When I assigned scenes for our performance, would this apply to her puppet?  Then we dove into the play within the play in Act V, and another student wailed, “You mean my character is a lion! Oh no!” And he went back to square one to redesign his puppet for Snug the Joiner as he performs the role of Lion in “The Most Lamentable Comedy and Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe.”

Susan’s students perform a scene from MIDSUMMER for the elementary student body.

With only a week for rehearsals and some of the puppets not quite finished, we readied ourselves for our performances. I pared the play down to its most puppet-friendly scenes, and then I assigned readers for each part. Like many directors, I’m sure, I doubted it could all come together in time, but the students performed beautifully in front of our K-4 students. The goal of performing live drove them to understand the scenes in ways they might never have done otherwise. Hermia did almost lose her head when her puppeteer rather overzealously jiggled her up and down during her insult contest with Helena, but otherwise we had no other mishaps and the children in the audience laughed and shrieked at all the right times.

My students couldn’t have been prouder of their hard work. Their end-of-year reflections often mentioned the puppet show and learning how to read Shakespeare as major accomplishments. One student wrote, “The puppet show helped me understand Shakespeare a lot more than I did before. When we were being puppets we really had to understand our role. We had to know when our person exited and entered and when they were asleep or awake. I think that really helped me understand because I had to know what was going on the whole time. That really helped me and I think it made me read with a different perspective.” More than anything, my students experienced Shakespeare as something fun and challenging, and I hope something magical they will come back to again and again as they grow up.

Susan Lucille Davis teaches 5th and 6th-grade Language Arts at St. Mark’s Episcopal School in Houston, Texas. She has been introducing readers of all ages to the magic of Shakespeare for three decades.  She has a Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from George Mason University and a BA in English from the University of South Carolina. When not teaching Language Arts, she also blogs at The Flying Trapeze and as a featured “Smart Teacher” at Getting Smart.

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Suit the Action to the Word

I’ve seen this activity done with many different audiences of students (and teachers), and it always makes me smile. The energy and creativity each participating group brings changes the activity slightly each time, adapting it to their interests and thoughts!

As seen in the opening moments of this video about our elementary outreach program, Shakespeare Steps Out, creating a physical language for a particular passage gives students the chance to make Shakespeare’s language their own:

Taking a vibrant passage like “O, grim-look’d night!” from the play-within-a-play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ask students to create a physical movement for each word and punctuation mark. For example, The students in the video above choose to crouch for the “O”s and clap above their heads for the exclamation marks.

Coming to words they’re not familiar with or unsure of, ask them what it sounds like, and about the context of the sentence it’s in to determine how to physicalize it.

This is a really fun introduction activity, and is very flexible for different classes and plays. Have you ever tried something like this in your class? How did it go?

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Shakespeare in ACTION

This past weekend I had the privilege of assisting on our 3rd installment of Shakespeare in Action -  a family workshop in which parents and their young children (ages 6-12) approach a scene from Shakespeare’s canon in a physical way. In the past we’ve looked at the opening scene from Romeo and Juliet and the climactic finale of Macbeth. This time we focused on parts of Julius Caesar Act 5, Scene 1. The focus is to approach the text seeking what we call “action clues.” What is the text telling us to do when we perform it? How can we best tell the story?

We started by warming everyone up with a couple of theater games to shake our bodies out and get comfortable with the group (we had about 30 guests!), then we settled down together to read the scene aloud. If there was a word someone didn’t understand or a phrase that seemed confusing, anyone could raise their hand and say “BING!” and we would talk it out together to see if we could use the context clues to figure out what it meant.

Once that was done, we split the group into two teams, and alternated rehearsing the scene and learning safe stage combat from our swordsman, Paul Hope. I appreciated especially when Paul asked our group if they’d ever done “Fake-Fighting” on the playground. Many hands were raised. “What’s the difference between Fake-Fighting and Stage Combat? Does anyone know?” The difference is that with Stage Combat we’re using choreography, a pre-determined series of actions that are well-rehearsed and completely safe in order to tell a story. People can get hurt when they Fake-Fight, but in Stage Combat everyone is safe.

With a full 40-minute rehearsal and the Stage Combat choreography under our belts, our two teams performed the scene for each other. Everyone seemed to have had a great time! One of our younger students filled out his comment card with “Funnest time in my life     love it      so so so MUCH”  while one of the parents emphasized that we “kept it fun and entertaining the entire time!”

Getting students on their feet to experience Shakespeare’s language is entirely do-able! All you need is one engaging, active scene and a little time.

If you’re planning to visit DC this summer with your family, please keep in mind that we offer free hour-long family workshops every First Saturday of the month! Join us to experience Shakespeare’s words in action (sans wooden swords). Or simply visit us any day of the week with your family to see this summer’s three mini-exhibits while we renovate our Great Hall. We’re open every day and there’s always something to see!

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“Let’s Make a Quarto” Family Workshop at a Folger Traveling Exhibit

Back in 2011, the 400th anniversary year of the King James Bible, the Folger partnered with the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, with assistance from the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, to produce the NEH-funded exhibition and website Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible. Ever since, a 14-panel Manifold Greatness exhibit, developed in partnership with the American Library Association, has been traveling to 40 libraries around the US that were awarded competitive, NEH-funded grants to host the exhibit and offer related public programs and outreach.

In this recent post from the Folger’s Manifold Greatness blog, Vickie Horst, manager of the Tifton-Tift County Public Library in Tifton, Georgia, gives a firsthand account of multi-generational learning at an April 2013 Manifold Greatness workshop entitled “Let’s Make a Quarto,” developed by a local retired educator.

—Esther Ferington, editor, Manifold Greatness blog

—————

Modern book making is a highly mechanized business. In the most common case, sheets of paper are piled together into a block, the spine edge might be sanded or notched, glue is applied, and a cover attached. There is little handcraft in the process, and when you consider the adage, “Good, cheap, and fast—you get to choose two,” modern glue binding is mostly cheap and fast.

On April 25, 2013, some Tifton-Tift County library patrons got an opportunity to see how book production might have occurred in 1611. Jerry Walker, a retired educator with a lifelong interest in the arts and a highly skilled crafter, led a workshop that we titled “Let’s Make a Quarto: a type of book made in the Renaissance era.” The workshop was held in the museum that houses the Manifold Greatness exhibit, so anyone who had not seen the exhibit got the opportunity to see it then, as well as make their own little book.

Advertised as a family activity, the workshop attracted a wide range of ages.

The basic idea behind a quarto is that a large sheet of paper is folded to make four smaller pages (hence the “quarto”). It was a very common way of producing books during the time of the King James Bible, allowing eight pages to be printed with only two trips through the press and using only one sheet of paper.

Some of our participants found out the hard way what this folding does to the orientation and the numbering of the pages. We suggested folding the paper, marking the page numbers and the bottom of the pages with a pencil, and then unfolding the page before decorating the pages with a story, stamps, stencils, pictures, and other decorations. (There was no glitter—we had used it all at the Renaissance Faire.) We got some great little stories and pictures. Some of them were upside down and in the wrong order, but we decided that you learn from mistakes, too.

The quarto workshop was held at the Tifton Museum, where Manifold Greatness is on display.

Our amateur bookbinders learned how pages were made into “gathers” and then sewn together to make a finished book, ready to be bound. On the 16th of May, Tracy Iwaskow will be coming from Emory University’s Theology Library and will be bringing some selections from their special collections. Many of the participants are looking forward to seeing examples of the professional bookbinder’s craft.

Vickie Horst is the Manager of Tifton-Tift County Public Library in Tifton, Georgia.

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For more tips on quarto-making, ruff-making, pen-making, and ink-making, see our activities videos and accompanying PDFs on the Manifold Greatness website. You can also view the videos on our Manifold Greatness YouTube channel on this playlist. 

We invite you to learn more about the exhibition in Tifton and at other libraries and about the King James Bible on the Manifold Greatness blog, which will continue through mid-July of this year.

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Shakespeare the Player

Last night, I sat in on the first preview for Folger Theatre’s new production of Twelfth Night. The romantic, knotty nature of the play was brought out in the production, and I, along with the rest of the very packed house, found myself enjoying the whole play anew. And then Feste (for not many companies cast a Fabian if they don’t have to) uttered one of my favorite lines in this play:

“If this were played upon a stage now, I could 
condemn it as an improbable fiction.”

It’s just such a wonderful, inclusive, self-aware joke. And because I’ve seen him so often in these self-aware parts, Louis Butelli has become my face of Will Shakespeare for the present, and I can almost see him creating that line 400+ years ago.

Mike LoMonico has said, and it’s true, that it’s not necessary to teach a biographical background in order to teach Shakespeare’s plays. You don’t need to know about Elizabethan life or stage practices to enjoy and explore the text, though instances for dropping in facts as they come up do arise. As a sometimes actor, I love finding these moments of player-hood in the text. This line in Twelfth Night, Hamlet’s speech to the tragedians, Henry V‘s apologetic Chorus, and – most especially dear to my heart – all of the mechanicals’ scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I’ve made it no secret that these terrible rustic actors are my favorites in the whole canon. Each festival season I fervently pray to see as many renditions of this play-within-a-play as there are schools to perform it. I even tried to get my wedding party to perform Pyramus and Thisbe at my wedding (they talked me down from that ledge). I love these players for throwing themselves whole-heartedly into their art, and committing to it despite lacking talent and means.

Students perform Pyramus and Thisbe during the 2009 Secondary Festival at the Folger

Recently, Carol Ann and I were left in charge of another school visit, and having discussed our mutual appreciation for Quince’s ragtag team, and Mike’s suggestion of dropping in facts as they came up, we decided to test out an activity for the students that combined Shakespeare’s Text with some player background, discussion, and history- to try to paint a larger picture, so to speak, as they came up in the mechanicals’ scenes in Midsummer. After a brief introduction to what an Elizabethan Theatre would have felt like, we used clips from the following scenes:

Act 1, Scene 2

(line 11) Quince tells his assembly what play they will produce: “The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe.” What kind of play does an audience want to see? What does this title make you think of?

(line 20) Quince assigns the roles in the play. Bottom asks if Pyramus is “a lover or a tyrant?” You were likely to see many plays about kings and lovers much of the time. Try to pick out Shakespeare’s plays that aren’t about either subject, how many do you have?

(line 45) Francis Flute protests playing a woman – on the Elizabethan stage, women’s roles were played by young men and boys.

(line 75) Why are the players concerned about the Lion being too frightening? What could happen to you if your play displeased the monarch at the time? The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s company, were once in danger of their lives when Queen Elizabeth I saw herself in the deposed monarch in Shakespeare’s play Richard II.

Act 3, Scene 1

(line 9) Bottom is concerned that their play is too violent. Can we relate to that today? Who in the audience is he most concerned about? What solution does he propose?

(line 46) During their rehearsal, Quince says that he hopes to have the moon shining on the night of their performance because “Pyramus and Thisbe meet by moonlight.” Is it actually necessary for the moon to be out for the play to be believable? What devices did Shakespeare have available to him to set the scene (ie: Merchant 5, 1; Midsummer 3, 2, 190)?

(line 61) Quince also points out the need for a wall for the lovers to whisper through. What is their solution. How would you solve this issue?

(line 90) Flute speaks all his lines at once. In the 16th century, actors learned their lines from “sides” – papers that contained their lines only, and maybe a cue or two.

Act 5, Scene 1

(line 134) The mechanicals’ play begins with a Prologue. Where else have you seen a Prologue, and what is its function?

(line 179) “O, grim-looked night!…” the O encompasses all of the emotion of the line (ie: “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!”) What emotion is Bottom/Pyramus playing here with all of these many many O’s? This part is especially fun for the best over-actor in the class.

Students perform Pyramus and Thisbe during the 2009 Secondary Festival at the Folger

(line 260) Throughout the play, the married couples add their own comments and interjections. Live theatre includes a live audience with live reactions. In Elizabethan England, nobles attended plays as much to be seen as to see. Sometimes there were seats onstage for them to show off their latest finery, and there’s a legend that Queen Elizabeth I once crossed the stage mid-performance to greet someone. The groundlings had no problem voicing their reactions during the play, either. Have you ever experienced something like that today?

(line 291) Even more fun – bad rhymes and stage deaths for Pyramus and Thisbe! Did the audience enjoy the play?

All-told, this portion of the activity took about 45 minutes, and we had a wonderful group of 8th grade students acting it out for us! At the end, we asked them to share anything they would take away from this, one student said, “You really had to use your imagination back then – it was all about the words and the actor.”

Not a bad takeaway.

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Action is Eloquence

~ by Danette Long

I recently had the pleasure of working with 20 pre-service English teachers at Montana State University in beautiful Bozeman, MT.  My purpose for working with the students was to discuss methods for teaching Shakespeare in secondary education.  I should begin by saying that this is a topic near and dear to my heart because I had no idea how to teach Shakespeare to high school students for the six years I taught English in Northern New York.  I wished dearly at the time that I had someone to enlighten me about teaching Shakespeare in a way that would actively engage my students.

I began my time as guest lecturer by asking Montana’s future English teachers to free write about their biggest fear relating to teaching Shakespeare.  There were many variations, but the responses boiled down to five big fears:

1. Lack of student engagement or general boredom with Shakespeare
2. Inadequacy in interpreting Shakespeare’s language for students
3. A personal lack of expertise regarding all things Shakespeare
4. A personal lack of enthusiasm for Shakespeare and his work (It seems not all English majors love Shakespeare—imagine my surprise!)
5. What to acknowledge or leave out, particularly regarding Shakespeare’s bawdy.

Anyone with experience in Folger philosophy will know that I could not have asked for a better set up to the next three days as I walked these students through several Folger activities.  The magic began as soon as I opened the lid of the Shakespeare Set Free Toolkit and we pushed the classroom chairs to the wall for:

in such business
Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ ignorant
More learned than the ears
(Coriolanus, III.ii)

While teaching performance-based approaches to Shakespeare’s texts to Twenty-First Century English teachers is hardly what Volumnia was trying to convey to her son in Coriolanus, the words are certainly applicable.  After all, it is one thing to tell someone something; we do this with our students all the time.   We tell them that they should use performance to teach Shakespeare.  It is another to show them, lists of resources that address performance are often mentioned in English methods courses.  But when you have them do it, practice it, teach it for themselves, well then, you have something altogether more powerful…

We began by discussing Edward Rocklin’s idea of reading “as investigators” in his text Performance Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare.  Specifically to go beyond the traditional ideas of identifying and discussing what the words in a text might mean, but to delve deeper and ask, “what do these words do?”, “what can these words be made to do?” and most powerfully, “what do these words make an actor make the audience do?”  These are heady questions to pose when teaching Shakespeare.  Taken together they bring out the important fact that Shakespeare’s texts are plays full of action, not static words pinned to the page.

We then investigated tone, stress, and subtext in language.  If you have attended a Folger Act I workshop at NCTE, you recognize the focus.  (If you haven’t had the pleasure, I suggest you mark the session in next year’s catalog).  Then we moved into some ice breakers with insults and compliments and 2-line scene cards, exploring the magic of the Shakespeare Set Free Toolkit.

The investigation of Shakespeare continued with a close reading of Othello’s Act II, scene i using Michael Tolaydo’s “Up on Your Feet with Shakespeare” found in Volume 3 of Shakespeare Set Free.  As we read, reread, discussed and debated the text, the students wrote notes on the board to support their investigation of who the characters in the scene were, the relation between the characters, the location of the scene, and what the characters were doing.  The students were amazed at how easily they understood what was going on in the text without having had any background for the play provided.  The level of close reading brought on by performing the lines was far greater than any read-from-your-seat analysis they had experienced in their own Shakespeare instruction.

Before I set them to the task of teaching their own performance-based lessons I shared one of the 15 minute plays from the Toolkit’s zip drive.  The students couldn’t stop talking about the applications for the 15 minute Henry IV, part I.  We discussed how easy it would be for them to recreate the 15 minute process with any play they would teach to their students.  (Many students shared that this was one of their favorites from the three-day workshop).

Finally, I put the students in groups to do the most important work of all: teach a Shakespeare lesson through performance to their peers.  Students worked in groups of 5 to prepare a performance-based lesson from the Twelfth Night Unit Calendar also found in Volume 3 of Shakespeare Set Free.  Each group had their own lesson to teach to the class.  In my opinion, this practice was the most meaningful exercise I could have students do for it is when we do a task ourselves that we achieve the confidence to repeat the process.  It is not enough to tell our future teachers to use performance; it is not enough to show them performance; if they are to have the confidence to use performance in their own classrooms with their own students, our pre-service students must experience the performance for themselves and they must be given the opportunity to teach through performance.

At the end of our last day I reminded the students of their 5 big fears and asked them to write once again, only this time I asked them to share how the workshop had helped alleviate those fears.  Here is what they said:

“This workshop has helped to alleviate these fears because I was able to act as the student and the teacher.”

“These different methods do not allow students to be un-engaged.  They have to participate, pay attention, and contribute.”

“I think the experience has helped me get some new perspectives on Shakespeare.”

“Shakespeare’s language no longer seems so impenetrable…Students are imbuing words in the play with meaning, I’m not doing that for them.”

“By putting students in the center of the text through performance, they will grasp key moments and details.”

“Introducing performance-based activities does a lot of the interpretive grunt work for the teacher because the students move into the close reader role more easily, often without realizing it.”

“Before, I did not feel like enough of an expert on Shakespeare to teach my students…but now I realize I can collaborate and learn along with my students…”

“I also feel as though I can approach teaching Shakespeare with energy as opposed to dread.”

“The one main aspect of this workshop I felt to be most beneficial was getting us on our feet and actively participating…”

“To be honest, I am much more excited to teach Shakespeare in my classroom.”

As for me, my love of all things Shakespeare grows with every new experience.  I will continue to make Shakespeare three-dimensional for any student in any classroom where I am lucky enough to be a part.

After teaching high school English for six years in Northern New York, Danette moved to Bozeman, MT where she is currently a Pre-Service Practicum Instructor and Supervisor of Teacher Candidates at Montana State University in Bozeman, MT.  She is an alumnus of the Folger TSI 2010 and had the honor of presenting in a Folger strand at NCTE 2011.  She earned her Master of Arts in English at Montana State University and her Master of Science in Teaching English from SUNY Potsdam in Potsdam, NY.  Though her friends think she may be crazy, she soon intends to pursue an Ed.D in Education.

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“Here will we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears…”

How do you connect Shakespeare with culture and history?

Those of us teaching Shakespeare to young people in the classroom are tasked with not only making learning interesting but also relevant. In observance of Black History Month, we want to pay tribute to the work of legendary jazz musician, Duke Ellington.

Ellington was a legendary musician whose career spanned fifty years. He composed many songs for the stage, screen and contemporary songbook. His is one of the most distinctive ensemble sounds in Western music He called his sound “American Music”.

In 1957, Ellington composed Such Sweet Thunder, a twelve part album that explores Shakespeare’s canon through jazz composition.

Try playing Such Sweet Thunder for your students: http://www.shakespeareinamericanlife.org/stage/music/thunder/dukeellington.cfm

What other tools can be used to engage students about Shakespeare?

Sheet music for Hamlet-Madness

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“You Shall Piece it Out With a Piece of Your Performance”

There are parts of my middle school English curriculum that I find to be really boring to teach.  For example: grammar.  Don’t get me wrong – I’m as much a geek for grammar as the next – but teaching it can be a drag… explaining rules, drilling through sentences, fighting the wavering attention spans…

When I’m feeling bored with teaching a grammar skill or literary concept, here’s my solution: I decide not to teach it.

So to speak.

Instead, I go hunting through my Complete Works of Shakespeare, revisiting scenes that I’ve enjoyed, until I find a little section or excerpt that can somehow dovetail with the concept that my students need to learn.  I let Shakespeare teach the skill.  It’s much more interesting to introduce a skill or concept when it emerges from something alive and active, like a mini-scene that my students have puzzled through.

I’ll give you an example.

I had to teach my students about appositives, those nouny-phrases that clarify another noun and which are usually set off by commas.  I thought about lecturing and using overheads and passing out worksheets, but that whole process just seemed so dull.  I started thinking about what an appositive phrase feels like when it’s spoken.  The whole idea of an appositive as “extra information” made me think of Shakespeare’s asides – extra information that helps clarify things for the audience.

So I doctored up a short excerpt from Othello, act 5, scene 1, which ends with Iago’s aside, “This is the night / That either makes me or fordoes me quite.”  The catch was that I had secretly deleted the stage direction “Aside” when Iago speaks.  Then I passed the excerpt out to my students and had them work through it, swapping out actors and directors pretty frequently, ensuring that everyone stayed involved one way or another.

Eventually, some of them started to wonder why Iago would announce his scheming to the other characters.  (It took willpower for me to not vocalize that observation myself!)  The actor then tried giving that line with a cupped hand around his mouth, whispering the line to the audience.  Voilà – they’d figured out the concept of the aside.  From there, it was straightforward to dramatize some sentences with appositives, inserting cupped-hands for commas.  And since the students owned the discovery of the aside, the corresponding grammar concept clicked more fully for them.

After that experience, I kept trying to link Shakespeare with other parts of the curriculum, such as literacy skills.  My 7^th graders were having a hard time making the leap from reading things literally to considering ideas about symbolism and metaphor.  We weren’t doing anything complex about Jay Gatsby’s optometrist or a piggy head on a spike; I just needed to get them to recognize the basic concept that sometimes, Thing A can represent Thing B.

What’s a scene in Shakespeare where one thing really, clearly stands for something else – a scene where the characters themselves are exploring symbolism?  After a little thought and browsing, I settled on a scene from Titus Andronicus.  (Yes, I can now say that I’ve done Titus with 12-year-olds.  Score!)  The titular character berates his brother for killing a fly, but then changes his mind when he envisions the fly as a symbol for the villain Aaron.  I introduced the scene to my students, telling them that Titus’s children had recently been murdered, raped, and/or mutilated (use your discretion.)  Also, I cut some lines from the scene in order to create a quicker dynamic that I thought would help my students recognize the change that Titus undergoes:

Titus Andronicus.
What dost thou strike at, Marcus, with thy knife?

Marcus Andronicus.
At that that I have kill’d, my lord; a fly.

Titus Andronicus.
Out on thee, murderer! thou kill’st my heart;
A deed of death done on the innocent
Becomes not Titus’ brother: get thee gone.

Marcus Andronicus.
Alas, my lord, I have but kill’d a fly.

Titus Andronicus.
But how, if that fly had a father and mother?
Poor harmless fly,
That, with his pretty buzzing melody,
Came here to make us merry! and thou hast
kill’d him.

Marcus Andronicus.
Pardon me, sir; it was a black ill-favor’d fly,
Like to the empress’ Moor; therefore I kill’d him.

Titus Andronicus.
O, O, O,
Then pardon me for reprehending thee,
For thou hast done a charitable deed.
Give me thy knife, I will insult on him;
Flattering myself, as if it were the Moor
Come hither purposely to poison me.—
There’s for thyself, and that’s for Tamora.

Some of my students acted and others directed.  Then we switched roles and they made some changes in the staging, movement, articulation, etc.  Then we switched roles again.  Gradually, the kids started emphasizing different emotional styles and actions to accompany the text.  I asked guiding questions: “Why does Titus pity the dead fly? … What does it remind him of? … Why does he stab the fly?”

Pretty soon, the students were talking about how the fly comes to stand for so much more within this little scene, changing from an innocent creature into a symbol for Aaron.  The actors hammed it up, taking out their aggression on the little wad of paper that they had dubbed “Fly,” as if they saw the villain himself in it.  After that, we returned to the Steinbeck novella that I’d been teaching, and the students could see that the protagonist’s pearl evolves to symbolize so much more than just a financial windfall.

Now although I love teaching whole Shakespeare units, nobody ever said that you can’t teach his work in bits and pieces like this.  (Or if someone did, then that person is wrong.)  When I give my students a Shakespeare scene, the onus is on them to figure out how to make sense of the language and the staging.  And when it’s paired up with another skill, then the students’ ownership of the scene transfers to that skill.  They learn the nitty-gritties of their English curriculum, and I get to have more fun.  Pretty cool combo.

Geoff Stanbury teaches 7^th grade humanities at St. Mark’s School of Texas in Dallas.  He is an alumnus of TSI 2010, where his passion for Shakespeare flourished through collaboration with talented colleagues and friends.  Geoff earned his B.A. at Sarah Lawrence College and his M.A. at the University of Chicago.  Feel free to contact him at stanburyg@smtexas.org.

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The Bard is Alive and Well

Ben Jonson once wrote of Shakespeare, “He was not of an age, but for all time.”  Now, almost 400 years after Shakespeare’s death, we live in a world where it gets more difficult every day to convince students of the Bard’s relevance. Cell phones, iPads, and video games seem to have taken center stage in the common teenager’s life.  Is it really as difficult as some suggest to engage today’s student in the study of Shakespeare and his play?  I would argue that Shakespeare is doing just fine in 2013.  In a recent Folger Education Facebook entry, there was a link posted about seven upcoming film or television projects that all involved Shakespeare.  PBS recently began their six episode series entitled “Shakespeare Uncovered” and the first episode examined my all time favorite play, Macbeth.  As someone who feels they have a strong grasp of the play, I was fascinated at all the little insights I gained from watching this episode.  It was especially thrilling for me to see Dunsinane Hill and possibly the remnants of Birnam Wood in the surrounding countryside. As I watched, I was already plotting which clips from the show I wanted to share with my students next year when we study Macbeth.

In addition, I am amazed at how many newspaper and magazine headlines, syndicated columnists, and television shows make references to the Bard’s works.  One recent example that comes to mind was an opinion piece about the US tax code and how it relates to Shakespeare.  On television, CBS’s The Mentalist had two episodes from 2012 where Shakespeare had a major role in the outcome of the show. In the episode, “Something’s Rotten in Redmund” the lead character Patrick Jane investigates a teacher’s death by hanging around rehearsals of Hamlet.  By the end of the episode, Jane is on stage playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father and let’s just say that this ghost has other things to reveal than a usurping uncle. In another episode, “Cheap Burgundy,” Jane catches a killer by misquoting lines from Macbeth that the killer supposedly knew nothing about, but who felt the need to correct Jane’s mistake.  In this week’s Sports Illustrated, there is a college basketball article by Luke Winn entitled “Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of Hoops.”  I love seeing references to Julius Caesar in my favorite sports magazine.

While this was a long-winded introduction to what I want to share, I think it is important that students be shown the numerous examples of how the Bard’s works are alive and well in the 21st Century.   With that said, I also think that, we as educators, need to embrace the technology of today and also get the students out of their desks and experience the plays on their feet.  In this blog, I would like to share two of the activities that I have done in my classroom over the past three years to make the Bard come alive and allow the students to use a plethora of the technology that they love.

One of my most popular classroom activities is the making of a movie trailer after we study a play.  With the majority of newer iPads and cell phones  possessing video cameras that are HD quality, many of the students can film these projects using their own devices.  Of course, actual video cameras may be used as well.  The simplicity of movie editing programs like iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, and other similar programs allow students to use edit the film and use effects that we could only dream of having at our fingertips ten years ago.  So far, my classes have done Hamlet and Othello.  None of them will earn Oscars, but they all have a special place in my heart and the students appear to really enjoy this particular week of my class.

Chris’s students act out scenes from HAMLET for their trailer project.

I will give you a general overview of what the students are responsible for, but if anyone has more specific questions feel free to contact me.  First, the students make groups of 7-10 depending on class size.  Together, we view some film trailers in class and have a short discussion on what was effective or ineffective about each.  Next, the students decide on which scenes or lines must make an appearance in the film.  I try and stress to them that short clips are most effective, but if you watch the links that I provide you will see that they don’t always follow those instructions.  Sometimes their disobedience was effective and other times not so much.  After building the script, Students also need to discuss scene locations(we are limited to our school grounds), costumes, and props.  We usually borrow clothes from the drama department closet, but you will see in the Othello trailers that some were just dressed in normal school clothes. Finally,  we begin the filming process.  Even though the trailer will probably be no more than one to four minutes long, it will probably take at least three or four days to film and we have the block schedule at my high school.  One can never underestimate how many times the “actors” will stumble over their lines, unexpected encounters with  students from other classes or cars that appear in your video backgrounds forcing a cut, or when the laughter bug hits and nobody can keep a straight face.  You can view the bloopers reel at the end of our trailer videos to see what I mean.

After all of the filming is completed, the editing process takes over. I usually do most of the editing with the help of a few students.  I think this is a mistake that I need to remedy.  There is a pretty slick trailer feature on iMovie that my dog could probably figure out with a little time.  My plan this year is to arm the students with iPads and allow them to use the iMovie app to create their masterpieces.  I have included links to our previous trailers here.  Hamlet #1 , Hamlet #2 , Both Othello Trailers.

Staying on the theme of video production, I’d like to quickly share a project that two of my students created on their own that I now plan on having my future classes do as a formal assignment.  They called it the “Shakespeare Infomercial”. Neil and Spencer picked a product to sell that played a role in a specific play.  In one Othello infomercial, they sell an Egyptian handkerchief complete with strawberry embroidery. If the customers acted soon enough, they would also throw in a complimentary scimitar and scabbard.  They finished the video with several satisfied customer’s remarks.  What I enjoyed most about the infomercials was how they threw in several references to the plays and the Bard that were very clever.  Watch the Othello informercial here and then check out their Macbeth infomerical where they sell witch cauldrons among other items.  The portion of the assignment that takes the longest is the writing out of the script. They filmed and edited the video on an iPad in under an hour.

I am out of space, but I hope to share some more activities from my classroom in the future.  Thanks for taking the time to read this and making your classroom one that makes the Bard come alive!

Chris Lavold has been  an English teacher and baseball coach at Mauston High School in Mauston, WI for the past 16 years.  As a 2010 Folger Library Teaching Shakespeare Institute participant, he learned many valuable techniques and insights about Shakespeare and the teaching of his plays.  He has spoken at the NCTE conference for the past two years on behalf of the Folger on topics specializing in technology and the use of film in the classroom. Lavold can be reached at clavold@maustonschools.org  or follow him on Twitter @Shakehitch.

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Audio Shakespeare

We’ve been thinking a lot about the benefit of having students listen to Shakespeare’s language.  With the recent release of the digital edition of Othello, we are in the process of producing an audio recording of the play that follows the Folger edition.  The goal is to enable students to read and hear the text at the same time.  Our current production of Henry V is going to give us the opportunity to do an audio recording of the Chorus speeches, and we’re thinking this might be helpful for students to have available to listen to, as well.  In the middle of considering all of this, it occured to us that it might be helpful to blog about it and see what kinds of responses we’d get to asking about how teachers use audio recordings of plays in their classrooms.  We’re not talking about passive listening. Rather, actively engaging students through a guided listening exercise or activity, for example.  So, do you use audio recordings of Shakespeare’s plays, or of any plays, in your classrooms? How do you use them?  Do you find the option to be a valuable one, based on your own classroom use?

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