Teaching
Shakespeare
(Chris Lima)
Shakespeare is a world celebrity. His reputation as
a playwright has been growing since the seventeenth century. Generations of
theatre-goers, poets, prose writers, artists, journalists and scholars have
contributed greatly to increase the admiration for his poetry and the growing
popularity of his plays, especially in Europe and in America. However, the
expansion of English as a lingua franca also means that nowadays more readers
and audiences have access to Shakespeare in English. Besides that, film
productions and live cinema performances are now making his plays accessible to
larger audiences around the world, also contributing to transform Shakespeare
into a household name around the globe.
When we think about Shakespeare, the first natural
association is with the theatre. However, Shakespeare has been strongly
associated with education. His work is part of the national curriculum not only
in England, his home country, but also in other English-speaking and non-English-speaking
countries around the world. But in spite of his worldwide influence and
popularity in the twenty-first century, the perception that Shakespeare is
either ‘too difficult’ or ‘too old’ – or both – to be relevant to
contemporary students remains. Historically, there have been two predominant
attitudes towards Shakespeare among both teachers and students: a reluctance to
engage with his texts because they are seen as boring and outdated, or a
reverence that treats them almost like sacred texts that cannot be touched or
questioned. Both attitudes are unhealthy and unhelpful. As teachers, we should
try to find ways of bringing Shakespeare to our learners that help them engage
and enjoy his plays and poetry as much as readers and audiences have been doing
for over 400 years.
Here are my first five tips for teaching
Shakespeare to both language proficient speakers and language learners alike.
1. Make it
relevant.
Start your lessons by contextualizing the main
issues that the play you are studying explores. Is the play discussing
friendship, jealousy, loyalty, greed, justice, family relationships, love?
Connect these topics to real life situations so your students can relate the
situations the characters face in the plays to their own personal experiences.
One reason Shakespeare’s work has endured the test of time is that we can
relate to his characters’ thoughts, feelings and emotions because they speak to
what is essentially human in all of us.
2. Don’t be afraid.
Although there are passages in some of the plays
that can be difficult to understand and baffle even Shakespearean scholars,
most of his texts are accessible to readers and audiences as long as we stop to
pay attention and think about the meaning behind the words and sentences.
Linguist and Shakespearean scholar Professor David Crystal and actor/producer
Ben Crystal mapped all the text of Shakespeare’s complete works and found out
that his language is in fact remarkably similar to contemporary English and
only 5% of his vocabulary is likely to cause any serious problems to modern
readers/audiences. There is a lot of myth about Shakespeare’s language which
has grown out of a lack of real contact with the texts. We fear what we don’t
know. Don’t be afraid; get editions of the plays with a good introduction to
help with the contextualization of the plays and then let the texts talk to
you.
3. Make it
memorable.
Select passages that are particularly striking to
work with in class. These can be key scenes in the context of the play, such as
Shylock’s trial in The Merchant of Venice; the window scene in Romeo
and Juliet; the ghost scene in Hamlet. They can also be
memorable because of the language in them, especially the soliloquies
– those long passages where the character addresses an audience, such as
the St Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V; the ‘To Be or Not to Be’ in Hamlet;
the ‘sleep’ soliloquy in Macbeth. These are quite famous passages
and it is easy to find YouTube videos of them, so students can watch the scenes
either before or after reading the text. They are also incredibly powerful both
in terms of emotions and language, and students can engage with them both
cognitively and emotionally.
4. Remember: these
are plays.
Hundreds of years of scholarship and studying the
texts may have made us forget that Shakespeare’s plays are not novels – they
are plays and were originally written to be watched, not read. Few people in
Shakespeare’s time would have read the scripts of the plays. In the
twenty-first century we have the privilege of being able to read the
texts, but we cannot forget that these texts only really come to life in
performance. If you cannot take your students to the theatre, find film
adaptations and recorded stage productions of the plays and encourage your
students to watch them. You will find trailers and videos of scenes from recent
performances at the Royal Shakespeare Company at the RSC YouTube Channel.
Select scenes and watch them in class. Put together a classroom performance so
your students can become the actors. You will see that the texts do make a lot
more sense in performance.
5. Explore the
Internet.
There are plenty of good-quality resources on the
Internet from where you can collect material to use in class and also direct
your students to so they can do some independent learning. Check the box below
for some of this incredible online treasure trove.
In the next article, I will be bringing five more
tips to help you and your students engage with Shakespeare both inside and
outside the classroom. Keep coming to onestopenglish, and don’t forget to share
these ideas with your teaching colleagues.
Shakespeare on the
Internet
Related resources
In this section you
will find a series of lesson plans
(Courtesy: one stop english-Number
one for English Language teachers)
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