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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Complementary Conversations

Taking a page out of Carol Ann’s book, I sat in on a couple of our High School Fellowship sessions recently. During this program, students study three of Shakespeare’s plays as scholars, actors, and audience members. Guest speakers come in throughout the semester to discuss a new perspective with them as they progress through the class.

This week we had two very different guests: Dr. Patrick Tuite and Marcus Kyd.

Dr. Tuite, a scholar and dramaturge, took the students through a couple of scenes from Richard III in both a facsimile of a First Folio and a modern edition. He called the First Folio a “blueprint for performance.” In the First Folio, there are several words that were capitalized (or not) in ways that would look odd to us, spelling was different, punctuation in some odd-looking places, and more that – to a modern eye – looks funny. These oddities are important for actors to see as they tell you more about who the character is and how they talk. Do they capitalize the word “Woman?” – if so, they might think more highly of women. Does the spelling help a rhyme? – perhaps it makes more sense in OP (Original Pronunciation). Is there a rogue apostrophe? – this might affect a hitch in speech.

These oddities have been edited for modern readers and actors to look more like what they’re familiar with, but the acting choices made in the 16th century run throughout the folio text. Looking back helps us understand what performance looked like, and more about how the characters were originally conceived. For more on Editing Shakespeare, please see our YouTube playlist  on the subject with Folger Editions editor Barbara Mowat.

Two days later, the students met Marcus Kyd, a local actor and director, who will work with them on their scenes for their final performance. After the students were assigned their scenes (mostly 2-person, and some groups), Marcus guided them through discovering their characters with four questions you’d want to answer as an actor: 1) Who are you? 2) What do you want? 3) What are your obstacles? 4) What are you going to do about it?

Then he had the pairs sit in chairs facing each other, and asked them to find the “hooks” in the lines of their scene partners that made them want to respond. The conversations in the plays have a lot of back-and-forth action in them – the characters respond to one-another, they don’t speak in a void. When they heard a “hook” they’d raise their hand (multiple hands, if there are multiple hooks), and put it down when their text responded to it.

For example: in Richard III, Act 4, scene 4, Richard is going to ask Queen Elizabeth for her daughter’s hand in marriage (after ensuring the deaths of Elizabeth’s sons, his own wife, and several of his own family members). She, sensing this danger, lashes out:

QUEEN ELIZABETH: And must she die for this? O, let her live,
And I’ll corrupt her manners, stain her beauty,
So she may live unscarred of bleeding slaughter,
I will confess she was not Edward’s daughter.

RICHARD: Her life is safest only in her birth.

 QUEEN ELIZABETH: And only in that safety died her brothers. 

RICHARD: Lo, at their births good stars were opposite.

 QUEEN ELIZABETH: My babes were destined to a fairer death
If grace had blessed thee with a fairer life.

RICHARD: You speak as if that I had slain my cousins.

 QUEEN ELIZABETH: Cousins, indeed, and by their uncle cozened
Of comfort, kingdom, kindred, freedom, life.

The colored text is where the characters respond directly to each other. Even in longer passages, one character may run down a long list of hooks that another character then responds to one by one. The students’ homework was to take their scenes home and, based on their exercise, find the hooks in the text that their character wanted to respond to.

And so in a few short days these students approached scenes from plays they’ve read and seen as both scholars and actors – with all the textual clues leading them towards a performance of the text. Shakespeare’s language is not insurmountable for its age, but knowing what to look for as actors makes many things clearer.

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Singing in the Rain

~by Jessica Lander

(re-printed with permission)

Where better to teach Macbeth than in a monsoon?

When shall we three meet again?  In thunder, lightening, or in rain?

That’s exactly what we did one muggy July afternoon when the ominous skies finally split, releasing a torrential downpour.

For an hour already we had been rehearsing indoors with the three teenagers cast as the prophetic witches of Macbeth. But, the result still wasn’t right. Despite their hard work, the students’ cackling voices were stilted, their gestures artificial.

But with the rains stabbing the windows I had the harebrained idea of taking our rehearsal outdoors.  Luckily, my students were just as excited and we all thundered down the stairs and out the front door – raising more than a few eyebrows from the other young thespians practicing in the halls.

The weird sisters hand in hand, posters of the sea and land!  

The three girls danced in the storm.  They yelled their lines to the waterlogged clouds.  They spun in circles, throwing their linked arms out, embracing the heavens.

As the sky cleared we traipsed, dripping, back inside.  Back upstairs, back to rehearsal.

But something had clicked: they no longer acted out the witches, they embodied them.

*****************

For the last two years I’ve taught at the bookends of teenagedom – college students in Chiang Mai last year and middle-schoolers in Charlestown this year.  But this summer I had an opportunity to see what happens in between the two.

Throughout the school year I had interned with the locally-based Actors’ Shakespeare Project, which, besides producing a great season of Shakespeare, sustains a vibrant education arm – teaching the Bard in schools, in after-schools and in lock-up facilities.

When my school year ended, I joined their amazing teaching team, under director and professional actor, Jason Bowen.

When most teens might prefer to be sunbathing on the beach or cooling off at a neighborhood pool, nineteen students – ages 13 through 19 – chose to spend three weeks of their vacation studying Shakespeare.

Our ensemble came from all across the Boston area.  They came from the suburbs and they came from the heart of the city.  They came from public schools and exams schools and private schools.  Some had previously come from youth detention centers or were once in city gangs.  They came with years of acting camps and school plays and they came with no formal theatrical training.  And every morning they converged on the small converted fire-station that became our joint home for a large part of July.

Very quickly I realized I was not in middle school any more.

Within two short days, our collection of strangers had transformed into a supportive and engaged ensemble.  In contrast to my sixth-graders, with whom I had to devote large portions of time to juggling behaviors and attitudes, here in the stage-lit black box, everyone came ready to learn and more importantly, to experiment.

We took the group outside and had them yell Shakespearean insults at each other with so much force that dog walkers and passing cars slowed down and stared.

We worked one on one with students: Lady Macbeth rolled and screamed as she explored the sleep walking scene; Ross ran up and down stairs, up and down, up and down before delivering, out of breath, the victorious news to King Duncan; the Porter walked around with a balloon under his shirt attempting to mimic a drunken stagger.

And students worked on their own – in corners of the upstairs rooms, on the stairs, in the front hall.  They scribbled notes in the margins of their scripts, they checked and rechecked different translations, and they repeated their lines under their breath – over and over and over.

Differences in age and experience and background dropped away.

Two girls playing Lady Macbeth got genuinely excited to look up etymologies in the two-volume Shakespeare lexicon.   The boys playing Macbeth took their work home and stayed up several nights past midnight (once til 2 am) studying their lines.

Friendships were formed over blockings of stage fights, experimentation with silly accents, and concocting of fake blood (equal parts chocolate and strawberry sauce).  It was a space where being a Shakespeare scholar was “Cool”.

At the end of three weeks we swept the stage, rechecked the light cues and opened the doors of our theater to admit our audience.

********************

If only all classrooms were black-box theaters: there is no better place to learn.   No desks, no pencil shavings, no wall clocks.

Paradoxically, acting allows students the freedom to act like themselves.

In school, students are consumed with adopting personas that establish them within the hierarchy of their peers.

But, in the black box, demure students learn to scream and cocky ones to cry.  Everyone gets to yell Shakespearean insults at each other and then, ten minutes later, to clasp hands.

By lunchtime each day, our ensemble would have attempted so many characters that slouching back into school personas seemed silly.

And that’s when the real learning took place.

Our black box Shakespeare theater granted our students the permission and the freedom to yell and laugh and dance and sing in the rain.

Jessica Lander has taught  English to Thai university students, art to Burmese refugee children and Shakespeare to inner-city Boston middle-schoolers. In her blog, Chalk Dust,  she chronicles her experiences as an educator in excellent prose. We look forward to collaborating with Jessica for future blog posts!

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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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It’s Hamlet Once Again

Folger Theatre Production, 2010

Thanks to the efforts of Folger Theatre, the Globe’s Theatre’s production of Hamlet is currently in residence at the Folger.  The reviews have been good, and audiences are deeply engaged in the work.  This collaboration between the Folger and the Globe has prompted Folger Education to re-release four video podcasts that focus on the play, including an insider’s guide for all audiences and three others that focus on teaching the play.  The vide0s are based on Folger Theatre’s 2010 production of the play, and  were filmed by Alabama Public TV thanks to a partnership between the two institutions.  When the videos were posted to the Folger’s YouTube page, there were no lesson plans for teachers to help them make the most effective use of the videos, but that’s now been addressed.  A series of lesson plans created by English teacher, Kevin Costa, specifically designed for use with the videos, and complete with Common Core State Standards references, has made them an indispensible resource for teachers.  As Hamlet observes, “The Play’s the thing.”

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