“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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Titus Andronicus

In a recent article in The Guardian (1/1/13), Brian Cox talks about his first performance for the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing the lead character in Titus Andronicus which, if you’ve read some of my other blog entries, you’ll remember is my favorite Shakespeare play. Cox notes that the role of Titus was “… the most interesting thing I’ve ever done in the theatre.”  That’s no small observation given the wealth of experience Brian Cox has had on the stage.  Deborah Warner, one of the first women to direct for the RSC, did an incredible job directing the play.  She gave it a life I had never seen before , and I had seen several productions of the play.  I traveled with a group teachers, part of an NEH summer institute, that summer, and I remember some of the participants laughing when I said the play was one of my favorites and that I was looking forward to seeing it. They did not share my enthusiasm.  The other Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night, was really good, but Titus is what I recall most vividly from that summer.  I remember sitting in the audience at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1987 and being mesmerized by the play. It is still one of the most engaging theater experiences I have ever had. I stayed in Stratford an extra weekend just to see it a second time.  Reading the piece in The Guardian brought back great memories of a terrific summer studying Shakespeare’s plays in Stratford. Is there a performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays that stands out for you?

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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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Folger Digital Editions and Lesson Plans Linked!

Twelve of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night were made available in digital format earlier this month by the Folger Shakespeare Library.  The response has been tremendously positive.  Now that these twelve digital editions have been put online for free, the lesson plans on the Folger website for the plays are in the process of being linked to those digital editions, and should be completed by the end of the week.  Hamlet is up and ready to be used.  If you search our lesson plan archive for material on Hamlet, for example, you’ll be able to link to the digital edition of the act and/or scene from the play used in the lesson.  And the link is right in the lesson plan to make it even easier for teachers to access the material in digital format.  Take a look, use it, and let us know what you think. And stay tuned because once the rest of the canon is available online in digital format, the lesson plan archive will be updated and linked to those editions as well.

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Close Encounters with the Bard

It’s true that you never know the way(s) in which you’ll be affected by the works of William Shakespeare.  Last summer, the Folger Shakespeare Library hosted twenty-five teachers from around the country who participated in Folger Education’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute.  This four-week program where teachers explore four plays from the viewpoints of scholarship, pedagogy, and performance is consistently described by participants as “life changing”.  It is in many ways.  One of th0se ways can be seen in the recent writing by Gabriel Fernandez, a 2012 TSI participant.  His writing, Seeking the Bubble Reputation, is a deeply moving piece — reflective, instructive, and engaging.  Fernandez’s insights, his integration of Shakespeare as he explores those insights, his “visualizations” (as one reader noted) are remarkable.  “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet, 2.2). How have you been affected by Shakespeare’s work?  How has it influenced your own work? Your teaching?

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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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How Pro do you Go?

A student Macbeth from the 2012 Children’s Festival

As teachers and students begin preparing to perform a Shakespeare play, questions arise that may not have been considered:

• Where are the costumes coming from?
• What props do we need?
• How can we set the scene?

For our festival schools, we encourage a minimal amount of props and costumes – it’s easier to transport, and it doesn’t distract from the awesome language the students are performing! Shakespeare’s own company didn’t have sets to work on, and all of their costumes  were donated upperclass clothes. Any props would have to be purchased (O, that shareholder money!) or made by the company.

Shakespeare didn’t write in must-have props and costumes for his plays – but here and there he may offer hints. Is a character carrying a letter or a bag of money to give to someone else? Does one character refer to another character’s clothes as “nighted color?” Are there definitely trees in this scene? As you read through the play with your students, underline these clues and decide if they’re necessary to telling this story. If they are, brainstorm together on how these can be represented for the performance.

The thing to remember most is does this tell the story? The audience has a great capacity for imagination, and if you gesture with a wooden dagger and proclaim that it is dangerous then they will believe you!

Are you planning a performance of a Shakespeare play this year? What will you be performing?

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The Power of Language

Shakespeare’s England was not overseen by a democratic government. Monarchs ruled for life, and successors were chosen based on royal bloodlines or who won which war. Despite this, Shakespeare knew that the public’s perception of a monarch went a long way towards the success of their reign. He gave his characters the power of language to persuade and control others. Many of his characters are gifted rhetoricians – they use language and the power of their words to bring other people around to their side.

Notably:

Mark Antony – uses the power of rhetoric to turn a huge Roman mob against Brutus and Cassius.

Henry V – uses the power of speech to boost his small English army’s morale as they seige France’s much larger forces.

Richard III – uses the power of words to manipulate his court and to become king.

Iago – uses the power of language to manipulate Othello’s view of his wife and lieutenant Cassio.

Hamlet – uses the power of words to turn right and wrong actions around in his head until he decides what to do.

It’s interesting to see, too, how the Roman elections look in Shakespeare’s plays. Brother is pitted against brother in Act 1 Scene 1 of Titus Andronicus to win the seat of emperor  Coriolanus spends the first half of his play looking to win the popular vote after proving himself in war, and the people’s vote elects the Triumvirate of Marc Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus in the war against Brutus and Cassius following Julius Caesar’s death.

The election lights usually fall on the person best able to win the people with their words in these situations. (Though the people technically elected Titus after his success in war against the Goths and he puts in a good word for the former emperor’s eldest son Saturninus instead of taking seat himself.)

We’ve been sharing lesson plans on the power of persuasive speech on our shiny new Facebook Page today to explore these characters’ impact on popular and singular opinion. As a democratic nation, today eligible voters are using their individual voices to collectively elect the nation’s leader for the next four years. Were we won by words, words, words? How do our nation’s leaders compare to Shakespeare’s (both historical and literary)?

Comment below, or Like us on Facebook to tell us more!

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