Is Shakespeare Literature?

~ By Kevin J Costa

Late this fall, at McDonogh School where I teach drama and run the Institute for Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies, my Institute students and I were talking about AP exams. And then one junior asked, “would it be acceptable to write about Shakespeare on an English AP exam?”

You just smiled while reading that question, right?

The rest of my class and I did, too, when we heard it. “Of course,” I said, quite surprised at the notion that Shakespeare might be off limits. But then it struck me, although she beat me to the punch, saying, “well, I just think of Shakespeare as theatre.”

The joke, in other words, was on the rest of us. I mean, isn’t this the whole point? If we teach Shakespeare through performance, we do so in order that students will have a deeper, more personal relationship with his work. Yes, we want students to read closely, to think in “literary” ways about Shakespeare — to meet, in other words, the objectives of an ELA classroom — but, I guess, it’s more important that we understand that goal. The beauty of learning Shakespeare through performance is that it provides students a deeply rigorous interaction with a complex text at the same time that it stimulates their creativity and their ability to problem-solve collaboratively. Oh, and yes — it’s a ton of fun.Think about it: this is the kind of thing kids will do on their own time — the school play, football, chess club. It’s real work, but compelling work because it puts them at the center of their learning.

It’s understandable that, for teachers new to this approach, this can be somewhat uncomfortable territory. “If I’m not talking all the time,” a teacher may say, “am I really doing my job?” And what about quizzes, passage identifications, and critical analyses? After all, these are more objective assessments than grading a group of students performing a scene. This is true. But the simple point is this: what do you want your students to learn (and not just what someone thinks they should know)? If it’s a deep appreciation for language, for an understanding of why Shakespeare helps us to comprehend ourselves, and a respect for collaboration (and yes, to meet Common Core objectives), then performance-based learning is the very best way to meet these goals.

You don’t act or direct yourself? No worries — you don’t need this experience. Print the Folger’s one-page handout, “How To Stage A Scene,” move the desks out of the way, and you and your students are good to go. You don’t want to grade the performance? That’s fine. Have them write an essay on what they discovered by staging a scene, and you can work on their writing with them. I think you’ll find a more authoritative, confident voice in that kind of writing than a traditional analysis, for students will have first-hand experience doing Shakespeare. In other words, they’ll be talking about how they made meaning with Shakespeare texts rather than thinking they need to find hidden meaning in them.

One of my juniors wrote the following about a scene she performed in class: “The fact that I needed to make my own choices prompted me to look deeper into the text to determine the best ways to say each phrase to make the story clear to the audience and look for any clues in the text where Shakespeare might have indicated a stage direction.” Not only do good actors and English students do this, good thinkers do this. The world will always welcome better thinkers!

I’m proud to say that the English department at McDonogh School, where Macbeth is taught to the tenth grade, all engage in performance-based teaching. When that unit is on, it’s no surprise to find groups of students all over the school clutching at daggers, sleepwalking, or shouting at a bloody Banquo. It’s a thrill to see.

And yes — some of them even write about the play on their AP exams!

Kevin J. Costa is a TSI 2010 Alumni. In addition to being an English teacher at McDonogh School, he is Director of the school’s Institute for Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies, Head of the Drama Department, and Director of Fine & Performing Arts. He also serves as the Director of Education for the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company and is former Chair of the Shakespeare Theater Association’s Education Committee.

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Sneaking Shakespeare

~by Gregg Long

These days, Shakespeare has a rather furtive presence in my classroom. Like designer jeans smuggled behind the Berlin Wall, we pull out our copies of Hamlet or the sonnets on the side, with an eye cocked towards the door. Not out of any guilt on our part: you can use The Bard to teach any number of composition or grammar tips you can think of. But having juniors yell “Now God, stand up for bastards!” in order to cover the interjection, can be so easily misunderstood.

My material for my writing classes have more or less crowded out the file folders, packets and binders covering the Renaissance, poetic meter, interpretive exercises and, sadly enough, the plays of Shakespeare. But I am nothing if not subversive.

Because I’m in the midst of putting together a new binder: “Sneaking Shakespeare.”

I’ll add to it as I progress, but the idea is to find ways to use the Bard’s language that are copacetic with writing, grammar and mechanics instruction.

For example, once I realized that, in my lifetime, I had picked up more literature through simply being surrounded by it rather than force-fed the material, I decided to give the students a back door into the world of Shakespeare’s language, rather than giving them explicit instruction. So on the first day of class this January(my seniors have me one semester at a time), I’ll be sneaking in some Shakespeare by handing out small scraps of verse as they come through the door.

Some of the verse I hand out will be done completely arbitrarily, but for the students I know, I pick the lines with care. “But Brutus says he was ambitious, and Brutus is an honorable man,” perhaps, if I think the kid has a talent for irony. Or “Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition!” for the guy who comes in yelling about having to write another paper.

Judy, in the second row, who has mentioned a preference for contemporary jazz, might get “Give me some music; music, moody food of us that trade in love.” And when Ruttiger, whom I was gracious enough to loan lunch money to last fall and who still has not paid me back, gets one of my favorites: “Base is the slave that pays.”

Once they have their slip of paper, I ask them to read it. Recite it. Share it with a neighbor. Share it with me. “Good,” I say. “Now, as to the course materials, here’s what you’ll have to…”

“But what does the line mean?” they ask.

“Never mind that,” I respond.

“Why’d we look at it in the first place?” asks another, not unreasonably.

“Never mind that either,” I respond breezily. It’s about now that they start looking at their schedules warily, wondering exactly what they were thinking when they signed up for the course.

And so we forget about Shakespeare for about a week, until we start in on the basics of argument, and how grammar and syntax helps prove our point. Or the week after that, when we cover claims and unstated warrants. Or powerful diction. Or figurative language. Or just about anything.

I can’t claim this is some miracle cure to restoring the humanities in the face of an overbearing preoccupation we have with an extremely narrow measurement of skills, but for my part, once they have the words down cold, the language of Shakespeare is easy enough to hone and polish lessons on the fundamentals of writing and communication. It’s pretty painless, actually.

For example, when covering modifying phrases, I have Judy recite her line and ask the class what the second part of the sentence is doing to the first part, and what would happen if it weren’t there.

And when we have to cover passive voice and when to use it, I call on Ruttiger (who still hasn’t paid me back  yet, the mooch) to read his line and try it in active voice. They inevitably prefer it in passive. So do I.

It’s an ongoing process throughout the semester, and it necessarily takes a back seat to many other components of the class: the persuasive essay, the modes of persuasion, the structure of writing and what to do when you’ve cut all your evidence from Wikipedia out of your research paper and have only a page left. But the funny part is, after about a month, when the students have their own and several others’ verse more or less committed to memory, some of it winds up appearing in their writing.

“Even a brief glance at how much hazing happens on campus is enough to make your ‘knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand an end like quills upon the fearful porcupine,’” writes Lisa. (Yeah, I helped out. But it was her idea.)

“More money is needed to study ways to combat psychological stress experienced by soldiers home from these wars,” writes Ruttiger. “Until Congress loses the ‘base is the slave that pays’ mentality, the problem will not get better.”

The thing is, it’s rarely my idea for them to include such gems, and it almost always has them asking about the plays and stories that prompted such lines in the first place. And every once in a while, I wind up lending one of my copies of Hamlet or Henry V. I get the impression they think they’re doing me a favor by using and pursuing the language like this.

No matter. I’ll take it.

After a lackluster introduction to Shakespeare in high school, Gregg developed a love of the Bard through teaching his works to his high school students. He revels in teaching his students Shakespeare through modernizing themes and relevant analogies to make the works more accessible to a modern generation. He holds an MA in English from Northern Illinois University. Gregg currently teaches Journalism, World Lit, and American Lit at Lake Park High School.

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Shakespeare’s Soliloquies: The Original Cutaways?

~by Josh Cabat

It is a trope with which we have become extremely familiar, from endless reality shows higher quality fare like Modern Family and The Office. A scene is played out, only to be interrupted by what in the business is known as a cutaway. Here, the character breaks the fourth wall, addresses the audience directly and describes what was going through his or her head while the action of the scene was happening. Perhaps they might offer some analysis of their own actions or comment upon the actions of others; perhaps they will reveal their deepest fears and wishes. Perhaps they will offer predictions and hopes for what is to come, and maybe even reveal plans for how they intend to accomplish those ends. Does this sound familiar?

Yes, it could be The Situation in Jersey Shore, or a conniving member of this season’s cast of Survivor. But this also describes the opening of Richard III or Macbeth’s dagger fantasia. It is a small stretch to say that today’s ubiquitous cutaways have their roots in the kind of intimate revelation to an audience that was essentially perfected, if not invented, by Shakespeare in his use of the soliloquy. So while I may not be entirely comfortable having Rosalind and Snooki this close together in a sentence, it is certain that our students’ familiarity with the cutaway is an easy path towards approaching the subtext of the plays and the rich interior life of Shakespeare’s characters.

To put this to the test, try this simple exercise, as I did with my 9^th graders in our reading of Romeo and Juliet. You can begin in one of two ways; either have the students perform the scene themselves and film it, or rip a pre-existing scene (no longer than 3 minutes’ worth, if you please). We chose the latter approach in addressing the meeting of the play’s doomed lovers in Act I, scene v. Students in each group chose the roles they wanted to play, and as a group came up with the questions that they wanted each character to respond to. For example, the students wanted to know how Tybalt felt when he saw a Montague at his family party but was restrained by Capulet from doing anything about it, or what Romeo was planning to do once he realized the identity of his newfound love. The students playing the respective roles had to come up with answers, in modern English but supported by Shakespeare’s text.

Finally, the students filmed their answers to the questions. After editing them down, they loaded them onto iMovie and intercut them at the appropriate moments of the original clip they had downloaded. They added simple titles, such as the character’s name as their cutaways play out, and that was it. The beauty of this activity was that the students were forced, as any actor or close reader would be, to comb through the text to find support for their character’s responses. I invite you to check out the result, “Modern Families (Both Alike in Dignity)” on YouTube here. As a way inside their characters’ heads, using this trope with which they are so familiar was both intuitive and fun.

Josh Cabat is the Chair of English of the Roslyn, NY Public Schools. He was the co-founder of the NYC Student Shakespeare Festival, and is currently a Teaching Artist at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He is an alumnus of the Folger TSI from 1993, and earned his MA in English Literature from the University of Chicago and his BA in English Literature from Columbia University.

Josh has previously written for Folger Education in his post Vindication: Coriolanus and the Modern Audience.

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Once more into the planning stages for HENRY V!

Folger Theater will soon start rehearsals for Henry V.  The Folger Education team meets ahead of the rehearsal kick-off to brainstorm ideas for the study guide.  We create a study guide for each of the Shakespeare plays that gets produced at the Folger and archive them on our study guide web page for teachers to use (minus the production specific material).  We look at the lines of inquiry we want to pursue — any question that may come up when thinking about the play.  And we consider what students should know about the world of the play, as well as themes presented in the play that may connect to students’ lives.  Then we look at other works of art that we can connect to the play and think about activities that teachers can use to engage their students with the play before they come to see it.  It’s actually a lot of fun — we laugh a lot, and there is a great deal of energy in the room as we bounce ideas off of one another.  Anyway, we met today to begin planning for the guide to Henry V, and it occurred to me after our meeting that it would be great if teachers had the opportunity to work collaboratively on planning units of study, not just for teaching Shakespeare, but for teaching any work of literature.  Are there any groups of teachers, or school districts that plan units together?  If so, how do you arrange to meet?  What’s the process you follow? For which plays have you prepared units of study?

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“All Thanksgiving Cheer Be Thine”

With just a few weeks before Thanksgiving, I thought that I’d do a quick internet search to see what I could find when I entered “Shakespeare and Thanksgiving” into the search box.  Wow! An incredible number of resources popped up on my screen.  The American Shakespeare Center has a page of responses sent in by friends of their Facebook page that make up their “Top Ten” favorite things to say at Thanksgiving, including references to The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello, The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night.  It’s great fun to read them. You should check them out.  And, while  I expected to find some quotes, I didn’t expect to find that I could even purchase a Winsch postcard that contains a quote from Shakespeare, “Now, good digestion wait on appetite/And health on both”  (Macbeth, 3.4.43-4).  If I created my own “Top Ten” list of my favorite references to Shakespeare and Thanksgiving, the one I found on JibJab.com would rank at the top.  It is just hilarious.  I suspect, however, that we could create a “Top Ten” list of our own, so readers, what’s your favorite reference to Shakespeare and Thanksgiving that you’ve found on the internet?

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The Games Are Over, Let the Games Begin!

This weekend saw the closing of the historic London Summer Olympics, and I’m sure everyone will still be buzzing about it for days to come! Our own Carol Kelly volunteered during the games, and rejoined us today still bubbling over with excitement, which, she says, is still glowing throughout London, as well.

While the modern games we know were revived in the 19th century (after having been abandoned during the 5th century in Greece as Rome became an Empire), the term “Olympic” was used to refer to  particularly athletic or physically apt men. Shakespeare himself used the term when referring to laudable, brave soldiers in III Henry VI, and again in Troilus and Cressida as Hector’s prowess in battle is described by Nestor.

Near the end of Shakespeare’s lifetime in 1612, a man by the name of Robert Dover organized the Cotswold Olimpick Games. Sports included horse-racing, running, sledgehammer throwing, dancing, and shin-kicking, among others. King James I approved the games, and they continued annually for about 50 years before becoming more well-known for the debauchery that took place there than the sporting events. The Cotswold Games were re-instituted in 1852, even as the Olympic Games were finding their footing on the world stage, again. The Cotswold Games became a regular annual event in 1966, and continue to this day! Yes, they still do shin-kicking.

But now this year’s games are over, and students will be turning again to school (with varying degrees of willingness) and you may be looking for them to reacquaint themselves with writing exercises that aren’t ”How I Spent my Summer Vacation.”

Why not bring up the Olympics in discussion, and ask what they thought of the passage that opened and closed this year’s London games? We explore Caliban’s speech in the Music section of Shakespeare for Kids with an activity to connect students to the text aurally. If you have older students, there are several points to consider for discussion or writing prompts!

Sir Kenneth Branagh as Isambard Kingdom Brunel during the Opening Ceremony

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill during the Closing Ceremony

Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.”

The Tempest 3.2.148-156

The theme “Isles of Wonder” would certainly lend some weight to it as it highlights the long history of England, and the stunning visuals the games afforded. I, personally, found the athletes to be almost modern air spirits – leaping, twisting, sprinting, swimming, and moving with speed and agility it doesn’t seem possible for mortals to achieve.

What does this passage inspire in their imaginations, and what did it mean to the Olympic Games in London? What sort of ceremonial staging would they design to go with this speech? Where were they when they watched either ceremony (if they did?) and how did the speech make them feel?

What did you think of the choice of text for the ceremonies? Do you plan to talk about the Olympics in your class?

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As Schoolboys from their Books

by Becky from London (tumblr)

The end of the school year is ticking ever-nearer. Final papers and projects are turned in, you’re running low on time to grade them, and even lower on ideas for classroom activities that are simultaneously not movies or graded projects while report cards are finalized and the students are still in class. Whatever the case, perhaps these short activities would be fun for your classroom as the year winds down:

Stage a Scene – give groups of students a scene from a play you studied this year (or didn’t) one scene to perform for the class. They may cast and direct themselves, and rehearse in clumps in your classroom. Have a trusty group? add an extra level of interest and send them into the yard (with permission) to record their performances on video (camcorders, smartphones, any media they have available) and air them for the class at the end of the week.

Make a Mashup - Hand out lines from the play you studied in class this year, as well as lines from another play (15-minute versions are great for this). Fill the students in on the plot of the new play, and give them the class period to create a 2-minute mashup scene from the lines they have. For even more mashing, give them lines from any play! Perform the scenes for the class in the next period.

Create a Quarto Yearbook – using 1 sheet of 8.5×11″ paper, fold twice (once each way), and mark the each of the page numbers while it’s folded (even the ones you can’t see, yet). Open the paper again, and pass it around to classmates to write a couplet, compliment, or quote, or even draw on each page in the direction of the number. Once it gets back to the original student, re-fold, cut the folded-over parts open to make the pages even, hole punch the center-line and bind with a piece of string. Make a cover out of construction paper and glue it to the “book.” This is how many books were printed in the Elizabethan era (only, of course, the printers would have used typeset), including collections of Shakespeare’s poetry.

“As Luck Would Have It” – Shakespeare’s plays hold the first recorded use of many words and phrases we now find familiar today. Give your students a handout of some of these phrases (link is to a Folger handout), and have them create a short story using a certain number of these phrases. Shakespeare also used words never before seen – like “eyeball” and “unreal” so don’t be afraid to combine your own words, too!

Certainly, you are as eager as your students to get to the last day of school, but keep checking in with us all summer! We’ll keep posting news, ideas, and tidbits that you may be able to incorporate into next year’s lesson plans! (But we won’t go there, yet).

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These People in This Room at This Time

~by Carol Ann Lloyd Stanger

students perform Taming of the Shrew at the 2012 Secondary Festival

A few weeks ago, I was able to sit in on a read through of Taming of the Shrew. I know the play; I knew the lines. But listening to those actors in that room on that day, the language really came alive for me. The actors brought parts of themselves to the lines, and then interacted with the other actors to bring the speeches to life. The words became living, changing things as I heard them.

This reminded me of an experience in a 10^th grade English program. I came in to help the students understand a play they were studying. I worked with three different classes in one day. All the students were 10^th graders attending the same school. In theory, the experiences with the same lines from the same play should have been—similar.

But different children brought different “selves” to the lines, interacted in their own way with others in the room. All three classes interpreted and presented the lines in entirely different ways. It was exciting to see the lines come to life through the students’ work. Those student actors in that room on that day created the play and the world of the play themselves. It was truly exciting to see it happen three different times.

Teaching students to experience, live, breathe, and perform Shakespeare allows them to bring the words to life. How do you encourage students to have a real experience with Shakespeare?

Carol Ann Lloyd Stanger is the Docent Liason for Folger Education, a frequent contributor for Making a Scene, and a published writer for Calliope magazine. 

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The world increases, and kindreds are mightily strengthened

~by Lucretia Anderson

Students and parents learn safe stage combat during Shakespeare in Action at the Folger Shakespeare Library

Students and Parents participate in Shakespeare in Action in a scene from MACBETH at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

In the olden days, families might sit around the parlor reading Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays together for the day’s entertainment. In 2012 we’re shaking it up! This past Saturday, Danielle Drakes and I had the privilege of working with an enthusiastic mix of 6-12 year olds and their parents in a workshop we called Shakespeare in Action! We had a fabulous time introducing Shakespeare’s language, some swordplay and creating scenes from Macbeth. The children and adults took to it likes flies to honey: immersing themselves in the playfulness of our activities and rollicking in the language of the Bard. Kids loved pelting their parents with Shakespearean insults as well as imaginary snowballs in our warm up activities. The parents didn’t hold back either! Interestingly most of them, including the adults didn’t know much about Macbeth. Once we explained there were swordfights and witches, it was on and it was thrilling to see these families engage with Shakespeare so fully.

The morning went by so quickly that we should have called it Shakespeare on the Fly! But sometimes doing drive by Shakespeare leaves them eager for more which was our intention!

What was really great for us was to find out the reasons families chose to attend a Shakespeare workshop in a dark theatre on a bright sunny Saturday morning with the Cherry Blossom Festival blooming all around us. Besides the young boys who came mainly for the sword fighting, most of the parents just really wanted to expose their children to Shakespeare in a different way than they’d been taught. Also, having the chance to do something together that was out of the ordinary also seemed to have a certain appeal. For the kids, I think the experience is priceless. It’s one thing to learn about Shakespeare and the plays at school, it is quite another to really experience the work with your first teachers, mom and dad.

What was your family’s exposure to Shakespeare? How are your kids experiencing Shakespeare now?

 

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Share your Shakespeare Celebrations!

You may have seen the little note in this month’s BardNotes E-Newsletter (not registered yet? SIGN UP HERE!), but we want to know how you’re celebrating April 23rd with your class!

What’s on April 23rd? Shakespeare’s Birthday!

At the Folger we celebrate big-time. After some celebratory lectures and events in the Theatre, we throw a big party for the neighborhood with something for everyone on the Sunday closest to the big day! Reading Room tours and Scholarly Q&A’s in Shakespeare’s Lounge; Elizabethan Crafts and Active Shakespeare Workshops (pictured); Sonnet and Portrait contests; Entertainment and Refreshment; opportunities to learn about Elizabethan life and the Folger Library itself (straight from the mouths of its founders!), and – of course – more!

This time of year is always pretty exciting for us – and since we know everyone loves a good party, we’re sure you’re planning something fun as well! Let us know in the comments (or email educate@folger.edu), and we’ll share ideas submitted by Friday, April 20th  on Tuesday, April 24th!

Anything goes! Classroom performances? CAKE? Essays? CAKE? Guerrilla Shakespeare on the playground? CAKE?!? Send us your plans, your pictures, your YouTube links! (Send us a piece of cake, if you want! We certainly won’t say no.)

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