by Deb Aronson

The Plays the Thing: Getting the Most Out of Shakespeare

The most effective approaches for teaching Shakespeare develop reading and interpretation skills, providing benefits that outlast a particular unit.
Introducing students to the works of William Shakespeare can be both exciting and daunting. Exciting, because his works still resonate and sizzle with life despite the intervening centuries. Daunting, because his language can seem impenetrable to students and because reading plays brings its own set of challenges. Luckily teachers who want their students to get the most out of Shakespeare will find many effective approaches available, approaches which will open up Shakespeares language for students and, through the language, give them access to his deeper universal themes. There is a lot of hunger for better ways to teach Shakespeare, observes Mary Ellen Dakin, author of Reading Shakespeare with Young Adults (2009), one of several books on teaching Shakespeare published by NCTE in recent years. Many of the most successful approaches focus on language, including tone and meaning, rather than on plot, theme, or character. Teaching students skills for reading and interpreting the language provides deeper understanding and a sense of ownership of a play, with benefits that outlast a particular unit. If at the end of Romeo and Juliet the student can identify the characters, the plot and the major themes in the play, nothing that theyve learned is going to help me when they come to my class the following year and read Macbeth, because they have different characters, plot, and themes, says Mike LoMonico, who taught high school English for 33 years before becoming senior consultant on national education for the Folger Shakespeare Library. They havent learned any skills. Whereas if they are working with language, by the time they get to the second-year class they have the tools to decode the language. think they do, and second, that they can figure out the unfamiliar ones. For example, Dakin has her students buy the Dover editions of Shakespeare plays, which cost $1.50, so that they can annotate them. In one exercise, for example, she has them put a dot above every word they recognize in a passage. Students soon realize that they know almost all the words, though the syntax and usage is different from contemporary English. This leads to a discussion about syntax rules when reading Shakespeare that students can apply to the next passage they read, lowering the barriers to their understanding and increasing their confidence. Annotation is such an important survival skill, notes Dakin. I cannot imagine reading a difficult text without being able to mark it up, to take notes in it, and highlight it. Another exercise that has been popular in her classroom is one that helps students with archaic words that are infrequently used in Shakespeares plays. Dakin borrows the term weird words from LoMonicos book The Shakespeare Book of Lists (New Page Books, 2001). She makes three columns; the first column lists weird words and the third column provides the correct definition. The middle column is blank. Students fold the paper so the third column is hidden and then fill in the middle column with their own definition. Students learn to break the words apart or say them out loud as part of deciphering the mystery words meaning. The students can have fun with this exercise, treating it a bit like the party game Balderdash, but also it teaches specific skills for figuring out the meaning of an unfamiliar word. (See Dakins Weird Words handout on the March Council Chronicle web page at www.ncte.org/magazine/issues/v20-3.) In a third exercise Dakin pastes a passage in Wordle.net. This site creates a word cloud, in which words vary in size depending on their frequency; the more often the word appears in the passage the larger it is in the word cloud. This creates an illustration that helps students anticipate what

Look to the Language

Many teachers have developed ways to scaffold Shakespeares language for students, methodically showing them, first, that they know more of the words than they

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Copyright 2011 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

a passage is about and affirms for them that the majority of the words are ones they know. Yes, at first glance [Shakespeares language] looks like gibberish, agrees Lyn Hawks, author of Teaching Julius Caesar: A Differentiated Approach, (NCTE 2010) but when the students start speaking it and realizing where the emphasis falls, and after they hear a sentence or verse five or 10 times, you hear them saying Hey this is Many teachers share the philosophy that the key to the deepest understanding of pretty cool. I think they can adapt Shakespeare is to teach his plays as both literature and performance. Exercises that to the old school way of speaking focus on movement, tone, and staging can all lead to deeper reading and bring the pretty well after enough practice. works to life for students. That repetition and spending more to bring the script to life and they must examine intensive time on small parts really pays off in terms of the smallest elements; even a period versus a question student understanding. mark can affect the performance and, thus, the audiences Hawks also recommends what she calls the tried and understanding of the play. Students also must experiment true insults activity, in which students combine Oldwith the possible interactions of these elements. English words from two or three columns to come up So, for example, in the opening scene of Hamlet where with inventive, Elizabethan-style insults. Teachers can do Barnardo asks, Whos There? Rocklin might pose the this activity with compliments as well. Hawks also posts question, what prompts Barnardo to speak? Rocklin urgShakespearean words in her classroom and encourages es his students to imagine the setting: Is it night? Is there students to use Shakespearean phrases and words, even a sound? Does Barnardo see a torch; does he himself using a simple aye instead of yes, in their everyday have a torch? Then, what does he do with his voice, does discourse. She will sometimes make a statement in he try to intimidate with a tone, or is he more curious or Shakespearean language at the beginning of class and fearful? How else could he use his voice? And when Franhave the students work together to figure out what she cisco says, Barnardo, in response to Barnardos Long said. live the king, what does that single word mean? Does Kids dont like to see themselves as scholars, but they he say it as an exclamation? What would happen if there love to know new things and work out puzzles, she says. were a question mark thereas indeed there is in one These activities, like those used by Dakin, serve to editioninstead of a period? gradually familiarize students with the vocabulary and In Rocklins classes students typically take turns acting syntax of Shakespeares language, and raise their confieach of these scenarios out and discussing which interdence and comfort level with the text. pretation makes the most sense within the context of the Performance Approach play and why. Rocklin also has students consider implicit stage direcMany teachers, including Edward Rocklin, author of Perfortions; where do you imagine the characters standing and mance Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare (NCTE, 2005), share why? Based on what evidence? What would happen if you the philosophy that the key to the deepest understanding of Shakespeare is to teach his plays as both literature and changed it? For example, where does King Claudius stand when performance. Since Shakespeares works were meant to be Queen Gertrude drinks the poison meant for Hamlet? Is seen, not just heard, taking time to consider things like he within arms reach and yet he doesnt act to stop her? movement, tone and staging brings the works to life. Or is he out of reach, making it impossible for him to Whereas readers simply take the dialogue as a given, physically stop her from drinking? actors must understand what motivates a character to Either way, of course, he is a villain, but perhaps he is speak, says Rocklin, professor of English at California a different degree of villain depending on the staging. State Polytechnic University in Pomona, California. They must explore how to use gestures, staging, voice and
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Shakespeare

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This kind of critical and close reading makes students better readers a skill they take with them even when theyre done reading Shakespeare. In another performance approach, Rocklin has students read Claudiuss line, O limed soul, that, struggling to be free, art more engaged. He then has students flap their arms as if they were birds trapped in something sticky, such as the lime referenced. Although this might not be anything an actor would do in a performance, it helps students understand how King Claudius feels when he says the line. The physical action helps convey the emotional turmoil to a surprisingly effective degree, says Rocklin. By acting the play students own the play, and the kinesthetic informs the literary, he says. The image helps us grasp how the attempt to pray intensifies rather than relieves his despair, he adds. In exploring this image in action, students have an opportunity to learn how the dramatist can not only speak to our ears but also touch our minds through our bodies. In her book, Dakin also discusses the importance of sensitizing students to tone. Tone can be a notoriously difficult literary concept for students to grasp, yet it is critical to the reading of Shakespeares dialogue, she writes. In one exercise, Dakin hands students index cards with different emotions written on each card. Students take turns speaking a word or phrase, such as Dont go!, according to the indicated emotion, such as surprise, excitement, anger, or fear. This activity shows students how a variation in tone can have a powerful effect on meaning. In Robin Folletts classes at Cary Academy in North Carolina, students are up,moving and reading out loud. But they dont read through an entire act from beginning to end. Instead, they focus on a single passage and act it out in a number of ways, using different tones and staging. It gives students a concrete way to see how many choices actors must make with the living, breathing text, and to see that there can be multiple, viable interpretations of the same passage, says Follett, coauthor, with Hawks and Delia DeCourcy, of Teaching Romeo and Juliet: A Differentiated Approach (NCTE, 2007). Our ultimate goal is to go beyond mere understanding of plot to engage with the text, he says. The deep investigation required when teaching Shakespeare in the way Rocklin, Dakin, and Follett do means that a given scene will be read repeatedly in order to explore and investigate a range of concepts and ideas. A common refrain from many teachers is to focus on quality over quantity. You have to leave things out, says LoMonico. Teachers are surprised when I say that. Then they feel liberated.

LoMonico, who also teaches English education (including how to teach Shakespeare) at Stony Brook University, notes that, an understanding of the plot, the characters and important themes will grow out of the exploration of language and how the words work. He minimizes the value of talking about Elizabethan England, Shakespeares life, or other contextual aspects outside the plays themselves. These topics are, he says, easy to test but arent the catalysts to a deeper understanding of Shakespeares language or themes. Rocklin and others do support teaching about the Globe Theater, however, since it informs how the plays were originally experienced by both the creators and the audience.

Differentiated Learning
Because of their complexity and timelessness, Shakespeares works lend themselves to differentiated learning, many teachers say. Differentiated learning isnt one-size-fits-all teaching, says Hawks. You really have to address all the varying needs of your learners, but make kids feel like we are a community and everyone has something to bring to it. There are no hierarchies here; we are all learning and growing. Reading Shakespeare is innately collaborative, says Dakin. This collaboration encourages differentiated learning: by working in groups, and by exploring the plays through a variety of means, including visual, kinesthetic, written and even musical, students have many choices of avenues to advance their learning, she says. In addition, Shakespeare is the great equalizer because his language holds challenges for everyone from advanced students to English language learners. When teaching Romeo and Juliet, for example, Hawks has her students talk about motifs such as masks, day/night, or sun/moon. For her novice students she might suggest choosing a motif they discussed in class, such as time, which includes the concepts of haste and leisure. The students might identify quotations with that motif of time, discuss the connotations of those words, or explore how idiomatic expressions (such as act in haste, repent in leisure) express cultural attitudes toward time. Hawkss advanced students might be asked instead to look for new motifs not already discussed in class and talk about how a new motif leads to a theme, or a universal truth. The idea, says Charlie Gragg, English teacher at Holly High School in Holly, Michigan, is to give students a range of choices to demonstrate their mastery of a particular aspect of the material.

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There is no doubt that tackling Shakespeare creates confidence, from high to low readers alike, agrees Gragg. I will never forget the day a freshman, who clearly could not keep up with the complexity of the reading, made a presentation analyzing the range of string instruments used in Shakespeares day, with further connections to Mozart; the student loved guitar, but hated reading. He walked around smiling for the rest of the year. Follett has seen that same Figure 1. Expectation Logs are one means of writing for discovery. Edward Rocklin suggests that recording predictions and projections, even when they prove to be result in his students, notmistaken, can be valuable, as the process illuminates crucial elements of the play and ing that Shakespeare is both our own mental processes. foreign and familiar, and that when students master his works occurred. (See a sample Expectation Log in Figure 1.) it gives them a belief in themselves and a feeling of Predicting, even guessing, what will happen next makes confidence. students more engaged in the material, Rocklin says. LoMonico uses differentiated instruction when he creKeeping the log enables us to record material we ordiates expert groups comprising a screenwriter, cinemanarily forget, both because later actions overwhelm early tographer, sound engineer, set and costume designer, and experiences and because we prefer to forget our mistaken an acting director. Together the group members watch a projections, he says. But these mistaken guesses are well short clip from a Shakespeare production (sometimes worth recalling because they can illuminate crucial eleseveral clips from different versions) and then, adopting ments of the plays design and our own mental processes. the perspective of their various roles, talk about why they did what they did. Without that first-person ownership, Shakespeare in the Age of iPhones its easy for students to slip into talking about what they For every teacher who is preparing to teach a Shakeliked and what they didnt like, as compared to why they speare play there is at least one student groaning, do staged, or lit, or costumed a scene in a certain way, says we have to? Why? But the reality is that Shakespeare is LoMonico. relevant to us allas Dakin notes in Reading Shakespeare, Writing and Reflection Deepen Students he is in the water supply . . . {he} permeates our culture. (xiv) And if there was any doubt that Shakespeare Experience would continue to influence the English curriculum, There are, of course, very compelling ways to explore witness the fact that he is the most frequently named Shakespeare through writing, as well. For example, Rockauthor in the Common Core standards that have been lin uses expectation logs, an approach he calls writing for adopted by 40 states. discovery. Shakespeares works are complex, nuanced, and Expectation logs are a way of catching our minds in multi-layered. They are exciting and daunting. Given motion, thereby enabling us to respond to the play in the right approaches, its quite possible teachers will be several ways, says Rocklin. sharing the rewards of reading Shakespeare with their So for example, on a single sheet with blocks arranged students to the last syllable of recorded time.(Macbeth, in three columns, he has students summarize Act I in Act V, scene 5). one square and then, in a second block, predict what might happen in Act II. Then for the third column, after reading the second act, students evaluate how closely their expectations were met and what surprising events Deb Aronson is a freelance writer based on Urbana, Illinois.

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