How To Teach Your Children Shakespeare

by Ken Ludwig

Since my early teens, I’ve felt strongly about Shakespeare—about the value of studying and memorizing significant passages by the greatest writer who ever lived—but it wasn’t until I became a father that I figured out how to share my passion with the people I loved.

One day, when my daughter Olivia was six years old, she came home from first grade spouting a line of Shakespeare:  “I know a bank where the wild thyme grows.”  Her first grade teacher was an English woman who took a particular interest in the hero of her youth, and she had decided to pass the torch on to the younger generation.  When I heard my daughter happily quoting this line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a light went off in my head.

From that day on, I set up a routine.  My daughter and I would spend one hour on Saturday and one hour on Sunday memorizing my favorite speeches from Shakespeare’s plays.  We started with short accessible passages from the comedies and, gradually over time, increased the length and complexity of the passages.  To my delight, my daughter took to it immediately, and it turned out that these hours spent together learning everything from As You Like It to King Lear were some of the best family times of our lives.   For two hours each week, we sat next to each other totally engaged in something we both loved, and we had enormous fun doing it.

Sir Derek Jacobi in Twelfth Night – who, along with Richard Clifford and Frances Barber, made special recordings of passages from the book. Photo by Geraint Lewis.

About two years ago, it occurred to me that other parents and teachers might enjoy hearing about our family’s adventures with Shakespeare, and I sat down and started writing this book.

What I have tried to do in How To Teach Your Children Shakespeare – which will be published in early June by Random House – is offer to parents and educators the techniques and strategies I developed over the years for my own children.  I realized early on in this process that Shakespeare is a lot like a foreign language.  Some of his words are unknown to us, even as adults; Shakespeare’s sentence structure can sounds odd to our modern ears; and Shakespeare is constantly speaking in complex metaphors that can sometimes be difficult to understand.

So what I did for my kids – as I do in the book – was teach them how to understand every word in the Shakespeare passage being studied, then memorize the passage so that their knowledge of Shakespeare became fluent, the way a foreign language can become fluent.

In total, the book presents the first 25 passages that I taught my kids, ordered into a specific sequence to make learning them as easy as possible.   And as each passage is discussed, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to The Tempest (with a lot more plays in between), I talk about the stories, the characters and the meanings of the works so that, ultimately, the kids get the kind of knowledge of Shakespeare they’ll need to become great students, great thinkers, and great teachers.

Recently, I had the opportunity of trying this method out on a large group.  I was invited by Random House, as part of Take Your Children to Work Day, to spend a couple of hours with the 9-11 year olds, about 35 of them.  I thought it would be fun to see if they could memorize a few facts about Shakespeare, along with one of my favorite passages from A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth mistook by me,
Pleading for a lovers fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

The kids had a fantastic time. At the end, when their parents came in, they proudly recited what they’d learned from memory.  Shakespeare triumphed again!

There is no doubt in my mind that knowing Shakespeare will make our children better citizens of the world.  It will better prepare them for the joys, as well as the whips and scorns of time (as Hamlet says).  It will introduce them to the rich world of literature, and, from there, to the universe of cultural references embedded in that literature.  It will give them confidence.  And it will, ultimately, by giving them Shakespeare’s perspective on the world, make them more moral human beings.  To quote Hamlet again, it’s a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Ken Ludwig is an author, theatre educator, and award-winning playwright of Lend Me a Tenor and Crazy for You. Ken will give the keynote address at our Conference for Teaching Shakespeare in the Elementary Classroom on June 24 (early bird registration discount ends June 3!). and a demonstration from  How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare to be released June 11, 2013. Copies will be available for signing after the session. Find out more about his work and new book at www.kenludwig.com.

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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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All the World’s a Stage

~by Jessica Lander
(re-printed with permission)

How does one translate “All the World’s A Stage” into the ancient language of Khmer?

Once again I have found myself teaching Shakespeare in an unusual environment.  Last year in Boston, I explored the elements of the story with 6^th graders and probed the emotional transformation of the bard’s characters with teenagers.  The year before, at a Thai university, our focus was the adaptation to a South East Asian setting.

Here, in the Kingdom of Cambodia, reading, listening, writing and speaking Shakespeare with Khmer college freshman and sophomores, our focal point has been the language.

In past years, I relied upon my childhood favorite – Macbeth.  But here, I am surrounded by empowered young Khmer women working to break the stereotypes of the role of women in Cambodian society. When it comes to choosing an appropriate Shakespeare play, there is an obvious choice.

What better play than “As You Like It”?

The play is a stark contrast to the romantic Khmer soaps my students are always watching, where woman are always seen weeping or imploring their men to return.

Rosalind does not weep and she certainly does not beg.  Instead she stands up to her uncle, dresses as a man to protect herself and her cousin, establishes a life for herself in the forest of Arden, and does not wait for any man to rescue her.

And so we began.

“All the world’s a stage,” proclaims the melancholy courtier Jaques.  And in the dusty city of Phnom Penh, the streets and roads, but most particularly our dorm, became our stage.

The transformation took less than a week

These young women took Jaques’ words to heart.  They practiced in their rooms and in the hallways and in the kitchen.  They repeated their lines on their Motos en route to school.

Jessica’s students perform a scene from As You Like It

Within a week they were quoting their lines to each other – saying good bye with a joking “I do desire we be better strangers” or “Goodbye Signior Love.”

Our Khmer Orlando embraced her role so fully that she altered her Facebook name to reflect her Shakespearean name.

To understand the full story we watched a movie adaptation. Whenever a student’s character walked on screen the particular student would correspondingly blush, or nod in agreement, or tease the others.

To introduce iambic pentameter I hung sonnets throughout the dorm.  I found students studying the sonnets in the bathrooms and the kitchens, trying to read them out loud and decipher their meaning.

Mostly we practiced.  We deciphered meanings of words and phrases: what does it mean when Rosalind charges her cousin to “take the cork out of thy mouth that I may drink thy tidings?”  We practiced pronunciations :“she” particularly challenging to Khmer speakers: Shepard Shepard Shepard.

“O Rosalind!” the girl playing Orlando exclaimed from the dorm balcony, causing at least one neighbor to turn from their laundry to look up.

After a month of exploration it was time to perform.

We selected costumes and reviewed blocking.   And then, one Sunday afternoon, we drove to the other dorm for a leadership seminar with all 80 young women, 20 recent graduates and 20 visiting Americans.

The girls changed into their costumes – pants, “manly” shirts, sneakers, some wore hats to hide their hair.  The girl playing Touchstone (the fool), drew a curly mustache and fake beard on her cheeks.

And then they were walking out on stage, my roommate inspecting audience members before pronouncing in a loud clear voice: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women are merely players.”

Be it in inner-city Charlestown MA, the mountain city of Chiang Mai or the dusty capital of Phnom Penh, Shakespeare has captured the fascination of my students.  Yes, Shakespeare is extremely difficult.  Yes, the language sounds weird and the meanings are complex.

I love teaching Shakespeare because I believe that it is challenging but also empowering.  These nine women rose to the challenge and I believe that these young Khmer women, who I have had the honor of living with and teaching, are all modern Rosalinds.

I look forward to watching their individual performances in the years ahead.

Jessica Lander is a teacher and writer in Cambridge, MA.  She has taught, among other things, Shakespeare and critical thinking to college students in the Cambodian Capital of Phnom Penh and the northern city of Chiang Mai, Thailand.  Closer to home she has taught math and Shakespeare to 6th graders in the Boston inner city.  She has written for the Boston Globe Magazine and keeps an education blog, Chalk Dust: http://jessicalander.blogspot.com

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Your Children Shall be Kings

During a particularly bad Idaho winter in 1996, my 10 year old niece visited me for the weekend.  She accompanied me to a meeting of my Shakespearean troupe, Stage of Fools.  Only one other brave soul dared to trek through the snow to rehearse that day, so we abandoned our show and read a scene that allowed my niece to play along.  We chose the Lady Macduff murder scene…what 10 year old doesn’t love to die a dramatic death?

Amy’s niece joins a scene from Macbeth.

We started our exploration of the text by reading through the scene.  I was amazed at how quickly she picked up the language.  There were only a few words that she needed help defining, and after the second reading, she fully understood the action of the scene.  This is when the fun began…we got the scene up on its feet.  With every reading, she became more and more animated and died with dramatic flourish.  It made me wish that she lived closer so that she could join the Stage of Fools!

I could have performed the scene with her all night, but the weather made me nervous, so we donned our winter wear to make the slow trip home.  Before leaving the theatre, she asked me if she could borrow Macbeth for the week and give it back when I visited her the following weekend.  Of course, I said yes.

The next weekend, I attended her 11^th birthday party.  To my surprise, she and her friends took turns enacting the scene for our entertainment during the party.  It turns out that she had read the entire play that week and taken the script to school so that she and her friends could practice during recess.  As you might imagine, I was one proud aunt.

A few years later, I was able to take her to the Folger Shakespeare Library.  It was a very special trip for us.  Today, she is an adult who still has a passion for Shakespeare.  In fact, she has our favorite quote tattooed down the back of her leg, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Over the years, as the owner of the Shakespeare High website, I’ve been asked by parents and educators how soon we can expose our children to Shakespeare.  I always cite this anecdote as evidence that young children are more than capable of reading, understanding, enjoying, and embracing Shakespeare’s language.  While attending the “Shakespeare for All” workshop at the 2012 NCTE conference, Folger educators shared that “cognitive psychology tells us that adolescents have a harder time with language acquisition and dialect differences.  Start with grades 3-6 because they are ready.”  By introducing our younger students to Shakespeare’s language in small chunks, they will soon be ready to tackle a full play, and 9^th grade teachers will no longer hear moans and groans when they introduce Romeo and Juliet for the first time.

Although I don’t teach elementary school, I enjoyed learning about the performance-based methods used when teaching Shakespeare to younger children.  If I didn’t live in the “other” Washington, I would attend the Folger Shakespeare Library Conference on Teaching Shakespeare in the Elementary Classroom June 24-26, 2013.  The conference theme is Sharing Our Stories.  I’m thankful that I was able to share my niece’s story with you and hope you will share your stories with me by leaving a comment below.

Amy Ulen is a TSI 1996 Alumni. After 20 years of teaching English and theatre, she moved into technology education.  She created the Shakespeare High website and eventually plans on updating it again. She continues her passion for incorporating technology into the study of Shakespeare both online and in face-to-face workshops.   

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“Shall we go draw our numbers, and set on?”

~by Julia Perlowski
(title quote from Henry IV, part 2)

In my high school honors English class, my well-meaning teacher decided to have us read Macbeth.  I was thrilled.  I had been in classes where teachers played records of famous Shakespearean monologues read by famous people with thick British accents.   Who can forget “Oh, pardon me thou bleeding piece of flesh that I am meek and gentle with these butchers!” out of the mouth of Marlon Brando?   Yikes!  If that is not enough to scare a child, I don’t know what is!  However, in this honors class we sat in desks in neat little rows and were asked which of us would like what part.  I wanted Macbeth!  I really did.  I had some fIuency with early modern English as I heard it from my mother’s mouth at bedtime and read it aloud in our family den when no one was looking.  The part initially went to Bruce Holsinger, who was the smartest boy in the school, now Professor of Music and English at University of Virginia. When Bruce needed a break and it was discovered that there was not another great male reader in the class, the part went to me.  I had a blast, and was quite pleased with myself, as was Bruce, that we were granted the coveted parts.  As a teacher of drama, reading and English, teaching Shakespeare in all of those classes since 2006, I now know that only 4 out of 35 kids “covet” those parts.  The rest are scared stiff or could not care less.  And, the kids who have a mild interest in Shakespeare don’t have much to do until they are finally prompted to say…”Here’s knocking indeed!”

I want to share a simple method, learned at the Folger and use extensively in my classrooms, to get ALL kids reading Shakespeare in a relatively short period of time, even with scenes where only two or three characters are speaking, even with monologues and soliloquies. Here it is:  Number the text.

That’s it!  A bulk of the good teaching methods with performative text relies on numbering lines in such a way that most kids get to have a go!  Most of my classes contain 30 students.  Most of my planning time consists of solving math problems in order to configure groups:  15 groups of 2; or, 2 groups of 15; or, 6 groups of 5, as well as numbering dialogue for maximum student performance time.  Consider this bit of dialogue from  Act 1, Scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet:

1 ABRAHAM:  Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

2 SAMPSON:  I do bite my thumb, sir.

3 ABRAHAM:  Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

4  SAMPSON:  [Aside to GREGORY] Is the law of our side, if I say ay?

5 GREGORY:  No.

6 SAMPSON:  No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.

7 GREGORY:  Do you quarrel, sir?

8 ABRAHAM:  Quarrel sir! no, sir.

9 SAMPSON:  If you do, sir, I am for you: I serve as good a man as you.

10 ABRAHAM:   No better.

11 SAMPSON:  Well, sir.

12 GREGORY:  Say ‘better:’ here comes one of my master’s kinsmen.

13 SAMPSON:  Yes, better, sir.

14 ABRAHAM:   You lie.

15 SAMPSON:   Draw, if you be men.

EVERYONE:  DOWN WITH THE CAPULETS!  DOWN WITH THE MONTAGUES!

PRINCE:

(1) Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace,
On pain of torture, from those bloody hands
Throw your mistemper’d weapons to the ground,
And hear the sentence of your moved prince.
(2) Three civil brawls, bred of an airy word,
By thee, old Capulet, and Montague,
Have thrice disturb’d the quiet of our streets,
If ever you disturb our streets again,
Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.

With the script numbered in this way, here are some possibilities for enactment in a class of 30 where all are involved:

1.  LINE VOLLEY:  Half the class can enact the EVEN numbered lines, the other half, the ODD numbered lines.  Lines will be spoken alternately between the lines.   One or more students can intervene as the Prince.

2.  ENSEMBLE SCENE:  Two groups of fifteen students can enact the scene each having their own line.   The part of the Prince may be read by all in unison…or by one person if one of the students takes two lines.

3.  3-D SHAKESPEARE:  Four students may perform the speaking parts of this scene with the rest of the class serving as directors with the teacher  facilitating between the actors and the audience asking the hard questions.  Who is here when the scene starts?

One of the most effective teaching days I had with this particular bit of numbered script consisted of a line volley with 45 students.  There were so many bodies that we “staged” the scene in two aisles of the audience across the middle orchestra seats.  Students delivered contentious lines as they climbed over seats brandishing rolled up scripts, eyeballing the enemies from the other side.

In another part of the country, two 3^rd grade boys share the Prince’s speech:

How do YOU do the math?

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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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Fighting With Truth

~by Gina Voskov

My first experience with Shakespeare was in 4th grade. I was asked to play the part of Celia in “As You Like It” for a Shakespeare festival. I can safely say that at the time I had no idea what I was doing or who Shakespeare was or why I had been asked to be in a festival, but 20-something years later, I remember the experience vividly. I wore a red velvet dress with a white lace collar, white tights, and black patent leather shoes. They were the most Shakespearean things I had in my closet in rural Vermont and even though they were technically my Christmas clothes, I put them on in the springtime to perform:  “I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry.”

I wish I could say that my 4th grade experience with Shakespeare set me on a course to love and study the Bard, but it did not. He quickly fell off my radar and didn’t appear back on it until my 9th grade year when we read “Romeo and Juliet,” and then again the next year when we read “Julius Caesar.” I think if it hadn’t been for “Julius Caesar,” I would have given him a chance, but the experience of reading that stupid play set me on a course to hate and avoid the Bard–we did worksheets and talked about caesuras and sat in our seats and read aloud. I vowed I would never again pick up a Shakespeare play, and was successful in keeping that vow. Until, that is, I needed to finish my English degree and the whole thing hinged on a single Shakespeare course. Do I really need to tell you about my anger when I realized I couldn’t graduate without taking a class about the one writer I hated more than anyone? Maybe it was my professor, or maybe it was the choice of texts she had us read or the way she led us through the conflicts and tensions and beauty of the plays, but that course changed everything. It was while sitting in our classroom on a spring day after reading “Titus Andronicus” that I realized I needed to be a teacher. Not because it was what all English majors would likely end up doing but because I needed to share Shakespeare. And the best way I could figure how to do that was by becoming a teacher.

After a decade of teaching, I’ve been at four schools each reflecting its own unique set of geographic and demographic variations, and each possessing varying opinions of how Shakespeare should be taught, and to whom. I now teach 6th and 7th grades in a large urban private K-12 school in New York City.

One of the courses I teach is 6th grade Humanities. In October we began our study of India and started reading a novel together that makes frequent reference to Gandhi and to his satyagraha movement: peaceful resistance using truth, or “truth force.” On one particular day, I had come from a frustrating meeting during which I’d heard, once more, that young students were not “ready” for Shakespeare and likely not able to “appreciate” it, especially a full-length play. I found myself biting my tongue, feeling my temperature rise, and resisting the impulse to roll my eyes. This is the standard argument I hear about why not to read Shakespeare with young students: kids aren’t ready for it. But I know that the younger the students are, the less inhibited they are–the more willing to play with the language and toss the words around in their mouths just to hear their sounds. As students get older, the pressure to understand and be “academic” about it increases. So if kids are young and playing with and doing Shakespeare, the better off they’ll be down the road–for all of the teachers who expect them to be academic about it!

So, reeling with frustration from this meeting, I stood in front of my class and told my students, “There are people here who think you’re not ready for Shakespeare and that you can’t do it, and this makes me really mad.” We talked about how they had already been doing Shakespeare–we began our year performing the “Cinna the Poet” scene from Julius Caesar alongside 12th grade IB (International Baccalaureate) English students who were reading the same play. We researched the real Cinna the Poet, discussed why there would be a character named “Cinna” in The Hunger Games, looked at artwork and made tableaux of the death of Julius Caesar, read and performed Mark Antony’s long speech, wrote eulogies for Cinna–a man wrongfully murdered and who would have been forgotten in history if not for Shakespeare writing him into Act 3 scene 3. My 6th graders were more than ready for Shakespeare. No, they wouldn’t be analyzing iambs and trochees, but they would be experiencing the words and sentiment and they would be asking questions about what happened next in the play. (And they would also, as a whole class, memorize the entire scene and shout it from the tops of their lungs one morning before class started, just as an administrator walked into my classroom to speak to me. “What is your name?” they shouted at her, grins achingly wide across their small, bright faces, and laughter bubbling around them as they continued:  “Whither are you going? Where do you dwell? Are you a married man or a bachelor?” Do I really need to tell you about my joy at hearing these 24 voices in impromptu unison?)

I told my students that day after the frustrating meeting that I was mad. And that being mad is sometimes a great way to be political. I said that I love proving people wrong when they don’t believe in me and the kids nodded in agreement, each remembering a particular moment in their own lives where someone said, “You can’t do that.” I told the kids that I wanted to film them performing Cinna the Poet and to show them off during my presentation at NCTE in November.  “And in that way,” I said, “We’re going to prove people wrong.” They began to chatter and one boy’s voice rose above the rest. He said, “Ms. Voskov, this is like satyagraha. This is like fighting with the truth.” He was right. The kids doing Shakespeare would be my weapons of truth in the fight for people, at my school and everywhere, to realize that Shakespeare is for everyone, no matter the age.

The truth is, these kids in 6th grade are ready to do Shakespeare. And the truth is that it’s not just these students in my class: It’s every young person who gets the chance to work with and experience and play with the language and get the words into their bodies. In 4th grade, “doing Shakespeare” meant memorizing Celia’s lines and finding the perfect Shakespearean dress to wear on stage. I claimed that play as my own back then, and now, 25 years later, I vividly remember the performance and how much I cared about getting in right–right down to my shoes. Now “doing Shakespeare” is an act of determination. When I hear from people that young children can’t appreciate Shakespeare’s works or that to “really get” Shakespeare they have to be a certain age, I dig in my heels and recommit to the fight. I think of my students united in voice and energy shouting, “Come brands, ho!” calling for a satyagraha of our own.

Gina is a middle school teacher in New York City. She earned a Master of Arts in Teaching Secondary English from Brown University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English at the University of Rhode Island.

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Whose Shakespeare? MY SHAKESPEARE!

~By Bill Parsons

As a warm up to this year’s Shakespeare plays, I had students read and perform Act 3, scene 3 — the scene where Cinna the Poet is confronted, attacked, and (possibly) murdered by a group of angry citizens.

This lesson is borrowed from one of the many resources available on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s web page.

So why take the time to act out a scene from an entirely different play?  Because this scene is a very short and very wonderful example of what makes reading Shakespeare such a valuable experience for students:  It forces the student to read creatively.

Why?

This scene is only about a minute long, and the language is very simple.  There’s nothing tricky about pronouncing the lines or understanding what people are saying to each other.

But in this scene, each line poses a choice for the person reading/acting it out, and there are many details that have to be added by the reader/actor.

So after having the students read the scene a line at a time, and then a sentence at a time — sitting n a circle — I asked them for some details:

§  The scene is a “street.”  That’s pretty vague; what details would you add?

§  What is it about Cinna that makes these four citizens confront him?

§  Where are the four citizens coming from?  What have they been doing?

§  Imagine that every character in the scene is holding an object.  What is it?

§  What happens to Cinna the Poet at the end of the scene?

The responses were all coherent and logical, and most importantly, they were all created by the students. One group imagined a group of thugs in a car pulling up next to Cinna as he waited to cross a street.  Another had the four citizens walking out of a bar.  Another added a mother with a baby to the scene.  One group had Cinna typing a text message, and one of the citizens snatched the phone out of his hand.

Reflecting on what the students did during these two classes, I realized that reading Shakespeare is an inherently creative activity.  As I explained to the students,

§  There aren’t any instructions on HOW the people are feeling

§  There aren’t any directions on WHAT to do while the lines are spoken

§  Every character has a back story.

And because of these “missing” pieces, the interpretation of every scene is up to the reader.  When students understand that they own the characters’ actions, then their reading becomes an act of creation. And if they create the meaning, they own the language.

Bill Parsons teaches grades 11 and 12 English at an independent boarding and day school in South Florida.  He spent last summer at Folger’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute, a life-changing experience that keeps giving new teaching ideas. You can read more from his “front lines” at http://englishparsons1112.wordpress.com

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Their Understanding Begins to Swell

~by Carol Ann Lloyd Stanger

Elementary students during a summer School Visit Workshop

I met with a terrific group of bi-lingual students today who came to tour the Folger and see the London exhibition. When I asked them what they already knew about Shakespeare, one of the first things they said was “He wrote in really old English that we don’t understand.”

It was as if I had written the script!

When I asked how many of them had trouble understanding Shakespeare’s language, lots of hands went up. So we had a great opportunity to chat about Shakespeare’s language, how similar it really is, and how they can get at some of the words they don’t (yet) understand.

To help them access the language, I had them do what Shakespeare intended all along: gave them lines from the plays to act out. We started with insults from the plays—perfect for eighth graders. I encouraged them to use their bodies (we quickly established a “no touching” rule) to reinforce what they were saying. Within moments, the students were practicing hurling insults at each other. Then in groups they insulted other groups and, eventually, the whole class.

After this activity, I had them look at their scripts. When I asked if there were any words they didn’t know, they said there were. I had them tell me how they figured out what they were saying and how they should act out the words. They had several good suggestions: look at the surrounding words, look for parts of words they did recognize, or sound the word out. It turns out that although several students didn’t recognize words in their scripts, not one student let that get in the way of enthusiastic participation. In other words, by acting out the language, they understood it.

I reminded the students what that Shakespeare is meant to be an experienced, that the words are alive and intended to be spoken and acted. By giving them an opportunity to do so, they were able to make sense of the words by turning them into action. It was wonderful to see them own these lines and recognize their own ability to understand language they had thought was too difficult.

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

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