Reapproaching Shakespeare in 3 Acts

3/20/2022

by Phil Olson

The school year has been long and full of challenges. Sisyphean, even. Still, the fact that third quarter is almost over is genuinely surprising. How can an interminable year slip away so quickly? Part of the answer, at least for me, is the approach I’ve employed: I am planning as I go.

In the before times, I meticulously organized detailed units; I even published calendars that included daily plans for a month or two at a time. This year, my practice has been to sketch and communicate a broad overview at the beginning of the week, then plan specific experiences on a day-by-day basis. This is definitely more time consuming and fraught, and I don’t want to work in this mode forever, but--darn it!—it is effective. I remain close to the action, at the students’ level, and I can speed up and slowdown in response to their needs.

Act I: Two "Texts"

My freshpeople and I launched our Romeo and Juliet experience using minimally-annotated, paperback copies of the play. I knew I’d need to combine readings with various resources from my files (summaries, contextual pieces, vocabulary lists, and the like), but in doing so I discovered that the supplements became replacements. Not what I had wanted.

After doing some hunting I landed on an amazing alternative: the website myShakespeare. It offers an unabridged, “glossed” text (see below), as well as a host of useful tools linked in the margins, including modernizations of tough passages, explanations of allusions, identifications of literary techniques employed, and deep dives into “weird words.”

Additionally, and perhaps most awesomely, the site offers two different types of videos. In the first, actors perform important passages with minimal trappings; this foregrounds the actors’ talents, as they lean all the way into their characters and express Shakespeare’s lines in more than words. The second set of videos feature character interviews, in modern English, that weave in important aspects of scenes, explore the characters’ psychologies, and play up the humor.

For most of the play, students did their reading on screens using myShakespeare, while using the paperbacks to do things that screens make cumbersome, like revisiting passages during in-class discussions, citing lines within papers, and practicing dialogue.

Note: myShakespeare is currently free.

Check out the introductory video:

Act II: Multiple Films

I remember studying Romeo and Juliet in my ninth-grade English class, and I can still picture my teacher stealthily making her way toward the TV (relatively tiny, and on a mobile cart, of course) to slide her folder in front of the screen at an especially interesting moment in Zeffirelli’s film version of Act 3, Scene 5 (the morning after the young lovers’ wedding night). Mayhem avoided. Master teacher!

Back then, watching the film was the “reward” for having endured the play, but today, I find it much more impactful to use several film versions and to weave them into the reading process. Films reinforce understanding, amplify interpretive possibilities, and invite critical thinking about all facets of a production. For contrast, I like to use three very different versions: The traditional Zeffirelli from 1968, the modern Luhrman from 1996, and a recording of a live, Broadway production directed by David Leveaux in 2014.

The “original” is corny, but retains its charm; the modernization is bold and over-the-top dramatic; and the Broadway version showcases the powers of live drama. In class, we had many passionate discussions about which production did things best, and most conversations led us back to the text.

Act III: Assessments

In addition to reading, discussing, journaling about, and watching the play, my students also engaged with several formal assessments, and my goal this year was to make them meaningful without being so heavy that they weighed down the experience (i.e. a paper about the history of iambic pentameter--here is a fun one—or a multiple choice test about who said what and when). Instead, my students made the most out of discussions; wrote short essays; did some not-so-serious sonneteering; and performed some passages in “table reading” fashion.

ESSAYS
I had students write three short papers (1-1.5 pages each) at strategic points in the play.

They first analyzed how the Prologue to Act 2 employs sonnet form and uses poetic techniques for effect.
At the close of Act 3, they explored characterization and how a title character is changed by conflicts they face in the first half of the play.
Finally, after the final scene, students generated a menu of topics with which to revisit important facets of the play, i.e. a motif, a rich passage, a secondary character, echoic scenes, or answering a question about the play—like whether or not R and J’s love is genuine, who is most to blame for the lovers’ tragic end, or how gender norms affect their worldviews.

We also built a proficiency scale (rubric) together by discussing what was most important to achieve with this essay and why.

SONNETS
In Act 4, poor Juliet (who has been married to Romeo for less than 24 hours) is berated by her parents and betrayed by the nurse, all of whom wish her to marry Count Paris, so she turns to Friar Laurence, the amateur pharmacist, for a helping vial, at which point she elaborates the many things she’d rather do than marry Paris, including jumping off of a high tower or being buried alive. Students took inspiration from this scene to write “I’d Rather” sonnets—sonnets with some twists.

Since sonnets are often about love, we decided to write about something we hate (irony!), but we wanted to keep things light and potentially humorous, so we settled for writing about irritations/pet peeves; yet we wanted to really get our Juliet on, so we used hyperbole to enumerate all the exaggerated things we’d gladly do to avoid minor irritations (hyperbolic irony!). Of course, they illustrated them too.

Here is an excellent example—Thanks, Ella! Notice how she worked in even more irony!

TABLE READS
Finally, I wanted to get students working together and grappling with performance, but I sensed some reluctance (when they said they were freaked out by the prospect) to full-blown enactments of passages, so we compromised with table reads. This involves reading in character without worrying about things like costumes, blocking, and such.

We read Acts 4 and 5 in this fashion, using group performances that included introductions to assigned passages, the table readings, and some follow up unpacking of plot development, literary devices, and other must-catch elements. Relatively low stakes yielded high engagement and pretty-darn-good Shakespearean theater.

Plus, table reads are fun (here’s proof from The Office):

So, we made it through a Shakespearean play, despite the wintry-gray cloud that always hangs over quarter 3. Of course, along the way, we had some less-than-great days, several strategies fell flat, and not all students bought the notion of Shakespeare’s genius. The unit was messy and hard; teaching Shakespeare always is, it’s part of the experience. So, I’m taking the mess as a sign that we did it right, and concluding that, sometimes, improv beats a script.

Phil Olson is an English teacher at Century High School in Rochester, Minnesota. He prefers to keep things simple.