NOV
16

To Teach, Or Not to Teach...  Shakespeare

By Charlie Lovett 

Playwright Charlie Lovett is Writer-in-Residence at Summit School in Winston-Salem, NC, where many of his 17 Pioneer Drama Service plays premiered.  Also an author, his novel The First Folio, a literary mystery featuring a rare Shakespearean artifact, will be published in six languages by Viking in 2013.  He is also the author of several other books, including The Fat Lady Sings, a young adult novel published in 2011. 

Educated adults agree — nobody used the English language with such grace, ingenuity and deep understanding of the human condition as William Shakespeare.  School kids agree — Shakespeare is boring.  How can teachers overcome this divide?  Most students first encounter Shakespeare’s works as words (many of them obscure or archaic) on a page.  They are struck immediately by the unfamiliar phrasing, the difficult poetry, possibly even the lack of clear stage directions.  Shakespeare on the page is confusing and difficult.  But William Shakespeare never intended his works to be read, he meant them to be staged.  Students who first encounter Shakespeare not on the page, but on the stage (or at least up on his feet) often come away with a very positive impression of the playwright.

When my daughter was eight years old, I played Brabantio in a production of Othello.  She came to see the play and was fascinated.  A few days later she wanted to come again and bring a friend.  The friend, who had never seen a play before, was amazed.  Neither of them complained about archaic words or obscure syntax.  They talked about adventure and intrigue, murder and betrayal, jealousy and costumes, and the fact that I died (offstage) in the second act.  The fact is, eight year olds are probably far better suited to attend their first Shakespeare play than most adults!  Eight year olds are used to not understanding every single word a grownup says.  Rather, they are happy if they just understand the story, and that is certainly what these two girls did.

My daughter didn’t read her first Shakespeare play on the page until she was in ninth grade; by then she had seen at least a dozen different plays on the stage.  When we lived in England for six months when she was nine, one of the highlights for her was seeing The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.  She saw me again as Feste in Twelfth Night.  When my younger daughter was seven, we took both girls to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre — I don’t think I’ve ever seen either of them laugh so hard.

So, how can an elementary or middle school teacher introduce students to Shakespeare?  The best way is to see a performance — a quality professional performance.  Don’t make students read the script beforehand, but do tell them something about the story and perhaps read aloud to them a few key scenes or speeches that they can then listen for.  I can remember a high school theatre teacher performing a one-man, ten minute version of Hamlet for us on the bus outside the Arena Stage in Washington, DC.  That was all it took for us to be ready to lose ourselves in the performance.

The comedies are probably most accessible to children because they are about so many things that children understand — people liking or not liking other people, mistaken identities, misunderstandings and happy endings.  There is also something about the immediacy of laughter that can show children that a play is still relevant.  The histories are the most difficult for young audiences.  I remember as a child howling with laughter at The Taming of the Shrew but sleeping through Henry IV Part I.

Of course, you may not have the opportunity to take your students to see a professional Shakespeare production, but there are certainly other ways to get them excited about the Bard.  If your school (or a school nearby) has a middle or high school theatre arts program, encourage the head of that program to produce a Shakespeare comedy.  There are edited versions available that still use Shakespeare’s beautiful language that are appropriate for performance by young people.

At our school, we’ve also had our eighth and ninth graders perform one of my own Shakespeare parodies (Romeo and Winifred; Omelette, Chef of Denmark and A Super Groovy Night’s Dream).  Each of these plays uses at least some of Shakespeare’s language and introduces students to various aspects of his work in an accessible way that is fun for actors and audience alike.  And you’d be amazed what children remember about the plays they see!  This year our seventh graders are reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and they still remember the plot and characters from having seen A Super Groovy Night’s Dream one time three years ago!

Even if you have no access to performers, you can still bring Shakespeare into your elementary or middle school classroom — just don’t start by making kids read a play.  I would start not with a whole play, but with an excerpt or scene.  And I wouldn’t make them read it on the page; rather, I’d have them get up and act it out in front of the class.  This doesn’t have to be a rehearsed or polished performance, but hearing Shakespeare’s words coming out of the mouths of peers will engage learners in a way that ink on paper never will.  (After all, the Elizabethans talked about going to “hear” a play.)  Some students will be shy about performing in front of the class, but once the bolder students have volunteered and had a turn, the others will begin to see how much fun it can be.  If you can get some simple costumes and props involved, the students will really start to see how the words on the page are just the blueprint for the play.  I don’t remember much about reading Julius Caesar in middle school, but I do remember when we all made togas out of bed sheets and went outside (because, of course, many Elizabethan plays were originally performed outdoors) to re-enact the assassination of Caesar as portrayed by Shakespeare.

If your students embrace the process of staging a Shakespeare scene like I think they will, see if there is a way to share it with the school — whether performing in the lunchroom, at assembly, or even on the playground.  Giving the students the opportunity to experience the relationship between actor and audience will draw them into the true power of both Shakespeare and the theatre.

If you’re looking for a scene to start with, you can’t do much better than the Pyramus and Thisbee “play within a play” performed by Bottom and his group of “Rude Mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act V, scene 1).  In A Super Groovy Night’s Dream, we preserved this scene in its original language (though edited a bit for time).  It brought the house down with hysterical laughter at every performance — whether the audience was kindergartners or adults.  It’s wonderful for students to see how jokes written four hundred years ago can still make people laugh, and it’s a way that even the youngest students can begin to understand why so many of us are still drawn to the remarkable works of William Shakespeare.