Shakespeare in High School

So, during the month of June I read three Shakespeare plays, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Richard III.  It has been and continues to be a great experience with my students as we focus in on these three plays in preparation for our own trip to Cedar City and the Utah Shakespeare Festival.  I am excited to spend that week with my students and see this plays (among others).  I thought I would take a second and talk about what we did with each play for other teachers and readers who might want to spice up how they read Shakespeare.

Romeo and Juliet--Honestly one of the most taught plays of our time.  A lot of our students had actually read it already in freshman English so this was a review.  However, the way that we read the plays made little details stick out a little bit more.  We started with this one because they knew the basic story line and we could focus in on extra detalis and vocabulary. The students were already split up into four groups and each group was given an improv situation that related to the act we were reading that day. (To see our improv scenes go here here and here)  Each group was also given a "theme" to focus on.  One group counted the number of references to love, another to death, another to count the references to skanky women, and the final to skanky men.  For all of our plays, we had the students keep track of "weird words" but for this play we focused extra on it so that students understood that they can look up words that do not know. I think all of the students found something new from reading this play out loud and with others.

A Midsummer Night's Dream-  Another one that is pretty common in high schools, but a lot of our students hadn't read this one yet. Prior to reading this play, we had one of our groups do a presentation on the myths that are covered in this play about Titania and Oberion as well as Pyramus and Thisbe.  This allowed our students to understand those stories when we got to them in the play.  As teachers, we liked this play because the students read a bit of it on their own and there were able to understand it to a certain extent.  This play is short and simple and to the point and with time constraints we didn't do much more than discuss it.  We focused on more understanding of the language just like with Romeo and Juliet.

Richard III-  Not your traditional high school play, but we are covering what the festival is doing this year.  It is actually one of the plays that I enjoy, and since I was the history major (I am co-teaching with another English teacher) I ended up taking the lead on this play.  We had one of the groups present about the War of the Roses which helped the students understand that difference between the House of York and the House of Lancaster.  One thing that is important to remember with the histories is that Shakespeare expects you to know of the information that he is talking about because his audience did.  So the first day of class we discussed what historical fiction was and how it is based in reality.  Then we drew a huge family tree on the board so that everyone knew how everybody was related.  They all got very confused with who was who with all the names but as the play went on they kind of figured it out.  The only problem that we had was Lord Stanley versus Earl of Derby--same person but referred to in both different ways in our play. With this play I also had the students pick apart key quotes from the play and pick out their favorite insults from the play.  I think it helped them focus in on different sections of the play.  Overall, the students found this one boring; I think it was the length and how long winded it can be at times.  I wonder if they will feel the same after we view the Ian McKellan version of the play. If you choose to teach this play, I highly recommend adding this movie to it, and splitting the play up into smaller chunks to hold student's interests; we didn't have the luxury of the time to do that.

Best of luck as you read Shakespeare!