Shakespeare in the Classroom
29 February 2024
In 2016, the Folger Shakespeare Library published an article by Esther French entitled “Which Shakespeare plays are most often taught in high school English classes?” The article reports Romeo and Juliet to be the top seller of Folger Shakespeare Library editions in 2015 and 2014, along with Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, and Julius Caesar (French). Replies on Twitter to the same question produced similar responses. In our own class, many said their first interaction with Shakespeare was with Romeo and Juliet in high school English classes. My own first interaction with Shakespeare was reading the Scottish play in eighth grade.
Perhaps that’s just the issue. If I recall correctly, many in our class also mentioned disliking Shakespeare in high school. At least in my own experience, Shakespeare in the classroom consisted of reading, either alone or out loud with the class, analyzing sonnet structure, and writing essays about the themes present throughout the plays. However, as we have seen through our own experience with Richard III, Shakespeare’s plays fall flat on the page. On the stage and even on the screen, the actors’ movement, inflection, place within the set, and even their silences accentuate the meaning all but hidden in Shakespeare’s words. Beyond the actors, production elements such as lighting and sound can also set the mood and tone for a scene in a way the spoken decor cannot.
Is it worth teaching Shakespeare’s plays as literature instead of drama considering all the art that is lost on the page?
While high school classes cannot realistically incorporate many big performance experiences, either as an audience or a production, could Shakespeare’s sonnets serve as a sufficient replacement for his plays in literature classes as the sonnets were only written as poems?
Can film adaptations or recordings of live performances sufficiently bring the performance aspect of Shakespeare’s plays to the classroom?
French, Esther. “Which Shakespeare plays are most often taught in high school English classes?” Folger Shakespeare Library, 30 Aug. 2016. https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/shakespeare-plays-high-school-english-classes/. Accessed 28 February 2024.
2 May 2024
For the symposium, I went through Rita Koehler's installation in Moreau, Glitch Mommy: Forty Days and Forty Nights. Working in the theater's scene shop and on Anne of Green Gables, I've walked through the Moreau gallery almost every day, right past the different installations that go up, but I rarely take the time to look at the art. While my typical focus is on the literary and performing arts, it was interesting to explore the contemporary visual art. Koehler's exhibit is inspired by her experiences with an interrupted adoption, which interested me as an adopted child. Her experiences, however, appear to be vastly different from mine, with the exhibit having ominous, heartbroken tones. For example, The cat's cradle floor to ceiling installation and its shadows makes the viewer feel trapped in a web, despite being inspired by a children's game. Telling a story, creating a tone, prompting emotions through visual art may not be so completely different from the performing arts. As I experience more visual and performance art, I continually find it remarkable how the manipulation and filling of space with objects, color, and light, even without words or sound, can so effectively convey an artists' purpose.
25 April 2014
In Hamnet, author Maggie O'Farrell takes a new perspective on William Shakespeare, arguing that Shakespeare's family in Stratford were a significant and important part of his life. She challenges the now typical interpretations of Shakespeare's personal life, which tend to gloss over his children, particularly the death of his son, Hamnet, and which also tend to assume Shakespeare and Anne had a tumultuous, manipulative, unhappy marriage. In her novel, O'Farrell particularly looks at the grief of the family in the wake of the death of their son. She takes creative liberties to help the audience connect with the historical figures as people, as a family, with both their struggles and their love. In the dense stories and hypotheses about Shakespeare's life, O'Farrell found a detail that stirred her heart to empathise with Shakespeare, to create a new idea of the now legendary playwright. I've had a similar experience, which I continued to think again about while listening to the Folger podcast. Egyptology has been a special interest of mine for some time now, and similarly to O'Farrell, I have latched onto the story of Tutankhamun, generally known as the "Boy King," and made famous by Howard Carter's 1920s discovery of the pharoah's nearly perfectly intact tomb. Looking into biographies of Tutankhamun, however, I found much more depth in his life beyond a "Boy King," or even an ambitious young king with a view to conquer the world. Looking over the facts of his life, I see a boy who suffered from numerous ailments, likely stemming from the royal tradition of inbreeding; a boy who lost his father and gained a broken kingdom; a young man forced to grow up too quickly, who took his childhood sandals and tunic, the ones with the ducks on them, all the way to his grave. I see a young man whose two babies died because the generations of the royal family were focused on keeping power in the family, not knowing the genetic ramifications of inbreeding; a young man who died before his tomb, the first step on his journey to the afterlife, was finished; a young man cramped into someone else's tomb, along with the remains of his children in their own carefully crafted sarcophagi. Beyond the facts of the biography, beyond the artefacts, there is a story to be told of a human life marred with grief, and deserving of more than being known by a word or two.
18 April 2014
Our performance project helped emphasise to me the differences between reading and performing and embodying Shakespeare. Studying lines to perform a scene forces you to look at every layer of the text, form the surface meaning to the subtext, the emotion, to the very sound and flow of the words. Interestingly, I didn't find the early modern English to be any more difficult to memorize. The lyrical nature, particularly of the text of Romeo and Juliet, made the lines easier to memorize. Giving voice to the lines, life to the character, were really interesting. It helped me internalize the story far more than I have every other time I've read or watched Romeo and Juliet. I've never been a big fan of the story, particularly of Romeo and Juliet, but preparing for our performance and doing the character study on Romeo helped me to at least understand his story, his personality, his motivations, and all of his many emotions.
4 April 2024
There is something to be said for Fortinbras’ final speech. It is almost reminiscent of The last scene of the Iliad, where Achilles releases Hector’s body for burial. Fortinbras is one of Hamlet’s two main foils, having also lost his own father. While Hamlet loses his father, he does not gain significant political power after the late king’s death. When the late king of Norway falls, however, Fortinbras gains that political role. Laertes may be Hamlet’s foil in that he, too, must avenge his father’s death, but Fortinbras is Hamlet’s foil in that he has to succeed his late father. At the end of the play, however, Fortinbras appears at the aftermath of all the political, interpersonal issues plaguing Denmark’s palace, and sees in Hamlet, not a vanquished enemy, but a fallen soldier. If Hamlet were told from the side of Fortinbras, the prince would sympathize, even empathize with the fallen prince of Denmark, who had been similarly robbed of father but further robbed of kingdom and life.
27 March 2024
During the guest lecture with Dr. Fox, an interesting idea came up of using Shakespeare and other classical western authors to bring relevant conversations about race, gender, &c. into controlled places such as prisons. While there are obviously problems with continuing to glorify white, male authors, I love the idea of using those male authors and their works as a backdoor into conversations about the problems resulting from colonialism by Europe. I, personally, do not currently agree with the idea of completely canceling the white, eurocentric canon, partly because I enjoy classic Brit lit, and partly because I feel that ‘canceling’ any literature is too close to banning literature. However, I also do not ascribe to idolizing white, European canon. Shakespeare and other ‘canon’ authors, however, can easily be taught as a starting point to talk about every social issue from gender roles, race, class, and more.
7 March 2024
Desdemona and Emilia are fascinating characters to think about in terms of the original productions having only male cast members. In Act 4 scene 3, Emilia passing the blame of wives’ follies to their husbands very much subverts what Elizabethan attitudes towards women would have been. Coming from the mouth of a man, however, through a misogynistic lens, Emilia’s speech could be a tongue-in-cheek criticism of women who retaliate against their husbands’ abuses. Desdemona, on the other hand, has much of the nature of the period’s ideal woman. In Act 4 scene 2, Desdemona literally drops to her knees, imploring Othello to explain why he is angry with her so she may try to fix whatever is wrong. Desdemona, however, still subverts expectations, because this “ideal” behaviour to Othello follows her turning down numerous suitors and running away to marry Othello. While literary analysis can argue for any number of interpretations of varying degrees of feminism, what might change when Desdemona’s words and actions come from a male actor?
29 February 2024
In Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism, Ruben Espinosa is focused on Shakespeare in relation to black and Latinx experiences. Similarly to many other pieces of racial discourse, black and Latinx experiences take center stage while Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American experiences take the back seat, if present in the conversation at all. I do believe, of course, that black and Latinx communities have been neglected for too long by Americans and that their experiences ought to be discussed, but as an Asian American, I often feel the absence of Asians in particular in discussions of race. Native American experiences, I feel, are gaining more attention, along with some indigenous experiences in relation to Shakespeare, such as how Villarreal flirts with Aztec origins in The Language of Flowers. In Asia, however, India and Singapore were British colonies as recently as the 1940s and ‘50s, yet I have yet to learn from these authors concerned with Shakespeare and race about how these Asian communities have interacted with Shakespeare’s works. Perhaps the British did not bring Shakespeare to Asia as they did to the Americas, or perhaps Shakespeare did not take root in the Asian ghettos that grew into Chinatowns across the US. However, I feel my lack of knowledge is in part due to the current focus on black and Latinx communities.
Maybe it is right that black and Latinx communities claim most of our focus in discussions of race, considering racism seems most focused on black and Latinx communities. Perhaps now is not the time to voice grievances about the lack of Asian representation while black and Latinx communities suffer so much inequity in our country. But I cannot help but wonder when the conversation about race will bring others, particularly all the different Asian communities into the heart of these important discussions.
15 February 2024
Shakespeare is a site of contestation because it has been presented as a cornerstone of the English canon, the canon which was imposed on indigenous people as part of colonization. In the prologue to The Great White Bard, Farah Karim-Cooper writes, “The main barrier to Shakespeare [...] is the way he was constructed over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which conveys an idea that he is only for a certain class of white English, American or European” (4). Despite this history, Shakespeare can be re-imagined to serve the communities recovering from colonialism, just as Borderlands Shakespeare is doing now. Borderlands Shakespeare molds the classic works to serve the community by highlighting the ongoing effects of colonization as well as preserving parts of indigenous and Mexican culture, including languages, rituals, and mythologies. The themes that arise in Shakespeare, such as family and political conflict, are similarly present in La Frontera, but Borderlands Shakespeare incorporates the realities and nuances communities along La Frontera experience.
If Saint Mary’s students were to similarly appropriate Shakespeare by incorporating their own experiences, emphasis may be placed on Latinx and LGBTQIA+ experiences. Instead of a classic interpretation, similarly to our production of Twelfth Night this past fall, another production might include more work by the students with guidance from the directors to insert diverse experiences into the show through script changes, alternate character interpretations and presentations, anachronistic set and costumes, &c.
8 February 2024
Having now seen Romeo and Juliet performed twice and read it for a second time, I am interested in how significant the performance aspect of Shakespeare is in his plays. The text of the play can be read and analyzed as literature, as poetry, as great writing, but there the entertainment part of dramas is lost if only looking through a text. An example of all that is lost on the page may be Act 4 scene 5, when Juliet is discovered apparently dead. There are few stage directions in Shakespeare, and this minimalism creates much more effort on the part of the reader to understand the dynamics of a scene. The nurse’s lines in the beginning of the scene, for example, “I must needs wake you. Lady, lady, lady!— / Alas, alas! Help, help! My lady’s dead” (4.5.16–17) are only accompanied by the stage directions of opening the curtains on the bed. Merely reading, the shift is more difficult to follow, but an actor on stage can use a beat, their facial expressions, and their body language to emphasize the discovery and the accompanying emotions. Considering how much time it takes a reader to understand what emotions each character goes through, a respect for performers, directors, and production teams must grow. The rehearsal process is long, tiring, and difficult, but the final performance does so much work for the audience to understand and interpret Shakespeare’s words so everyone can not only follow the story, but be moved by it.
1 February 2024
Reading Richard III as someone who has been involved in theater production, I imagined how some scenes might be played on the modern stage and how the scenes may be manipulated to have a different tone. The ghost sequence in Act 5 scene 3, for example, I can imagine, of course, as very dramatic and dark, but reading the scene, my first instinct was to imagine a comical, tongue-in-cheek production of the scene. Each ghost’s entrance, for example, might be accompanied with fog and low, ominous music, the ghost dimly lit in eerie greens as the ghost tells Richard to despair and die. The comical twist, however, would come as the ghost turns to address Richmond and the eerie music ends abruptly, the lights warm and brighten, and the ghost’s attitude perks up as they explain that, even though Richmond didn’t know them in life, they’re rooting for him in the upcoming battle. Shakespeare, I feel, always has the ability to stretch from very grave, solemn tones to comical, self-aware tones, especially on stage. The unwritten comedy of Shakespeare, like other stage productions, is special in that it often doesn’t translate to film very well. The nature of live performance can change the energy and implications of the text of a play, and it is always interesting to explore how the meaning of a text may change based on the blocking, lighting, set, or props in a live theater setting.
25 January 2024
Beyond plot, characters, audience, and commissioner, the physical space of the theater affected the structure and very text of Shakespeare’s plays. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine explain the current historical knowledge of the theaters that hosted Shakespeare’s plays for Folger Shakespeare Library, explaining, “First of all, they were open-air playhouses” (Barbara and Werstine). Exposed to the elements, there was very little control over lighting effects, unlike today’s stage lights that can simulate any color or time of day. Furthermore, “the playhouses of Shakespeare’s time did not fill the stage with scenery to make the setting precise” (Barbara and Werstine). With minimal scenery and essentially no control over lighting, such visual elements had to be supplemented in the text. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, therefore, required their characters to tell the audience when and where each scene takes place. Transitioning between scenes faced similar architectural obstacles, as the actors “were not separated from the audience by the dropping of a curtain between acts and scenes” (Barbara and Werstine). Once more, Shakespeare and contemporary playwrights had to write around their physical constraints, either writing dialogue that indicated a scene change or making use of entrances and exits. Without the context of the architectural restraints of Elizabethan theaters, such textual details might seem strange to readers only familiar with modern western theater. By extension, reading Shakespeare can be even more confusing without keeping in mind the context of the texts as providing the foundation for a theatrical performance that would include physical aspects not necessarily evident in the text.
Mowat, Barabara, and Paul Werstine. “Shakespeare’s Theater: From the Folger Shakespeare Editions.” Folger Shakespeare Library, https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-theater-from-the-folger-shakespeare-editions/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2024.
18 January 2024
Inga-Stina Ewbank explores the relationships between grammar, literary and poetic devices, history, and the nature of drama throughout William Shakespeare’s plays in her chapter “Close Reading” in Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. As literary works, Shakespeare first animates his works by manipulating the structure of the lines for each character. Ewbank explains that Shakespeare, like many of his contemporary playwrights, generally gave “prose to speakers of an inferior class [...] and blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) to their betters” (399). The distinction of class through prose or verse was stylistic of the times (399), and Shakespeare subverted the tradition to emphasize a character’s state of mind, such as having Hamlet or Lady Macbeth dissolve into prose as their minds deteriorate. Through this manipulation of structure, along with similar manipulation of words, such as imagery and wordplay, Shakespeare laid the foundation for his stories to be further brought to life on the stage. Beyond the text, Ewbank discusses how the dramatic, theatrical nature of Shakespeare’s works affects the contents of the text, saying “what is heard (or read) cannot be separated from what is (or is intended to be) seen” (393). Plays are just that, so stage notes indicating the action of certain characters may change how a line is implied, for example. The historical context of all actors of Shakespeare’s time being men or boys may add another depth of meaning to a heroine’s lines. While the historical context, theatrical nature, and literary aspects of Shakespeare’s plays are each significant in their own right, the relationships between them may be reason enough to continue studying his works.
Ewbank, Inga-Stina. “Close Reading.” Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, pp. 391–401.