How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019
One powerpoint to rule them all – structural choices
How to teach shakespeare
I adore teaching the plays of Shakespeare. In fact, I enjoy it so much, I am always on the lookout for opportunities to teach different ones. More has been written about Shakespeare than about any other writer; he deals with complex and shared human experiences which apply to us all. We have all been children. We have all lost something — an object, a pet or a person. We are all hungry for something. His plays are rich in ideas, thought and language. He deals with people in real situations. Soaps spend ages trying to create the level of believability that Shakespeare forges in an hour-and-a-half.
Aside from dealing with complex and emotional experiences, they are also darn good stories which contain challenges to our thinking. What happens when a king goes bad? What happens when a king is killed by his subjects? What happens in a relationship when one person has more power than the other? What happens if you start making decisions based on a prediction of your future?
One of the beauties of the plays is that you can dive in anywhere. You could jump into Benedick and Beatrice’s arguing in Much Ado About Nothing or explore the opening scene of Hamlet and analyse how Shakespeare builds a world through language. There have been countless interpretations and productions, each with a different angle and, like gardening or football, you can either sit on the sidelines watching others or get to the real fun by doing it yourself. Read it aloud. Act it out. Play around with it. The text is malleable and ready for you to shape.
I have had some of my most enjoyable lessons teaching Shakespeare — for example, when working with a Year 10 rugby player pretending to be Lady Macbeth, including blonde wig and high-pitched voice, and when arguments, insightful ones, broke out over whether Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock is racist or not. Whether it is exploring how Beatrice is the most modern portrayal of a woman in Shakespeare’s plays or exploring the use of euphemism, there’s so much to take from them. They give so much and they stay with you.
Aside from the cultural angle, there is an even greater argument for studying more and more Shakespeare in the classroom. It shows that you are not willing to patronise students or ’dumb down’. You are giving the students a simple message: you think that they are clever and capable of difficult and great things. Therefore, if a student asks the immortal question, ’Why do we have to learn about Shakespeare?’, you may respond with the equally imperishable reply, ’Because the universe says you can’t cope with it, but I know you can.’
1. One powerpoint to rule them all — structural choices
Whether you are looking at language, structure or form, the key thing to explore is why Shakespeare made that specific choice to present his ideas. Teach a student how to spot an oxymoron and you can guarantee they will search for one in every single piece of literature. And that is the problem with Shakespeare. It is all too easy for students to spot devices and forget the big structural choices needed to create a scene.
Take a simple choice like the time of day. What’s the impact of this? A scene set during the day might be ordinary, happy, routine, truthful and noisy. A scene set during the night might be unusual, secretive, unhappy, magical and quiet. Take Macbeth and the infamous scene after the murder of King Duncan (Act 2, Scene 2). Why set this in the middle of the night? This choice has lots of implications and ramifications:
✵ Evil spirits are associated with night-time.
✵ Darkness hides and masks the identity of the culprits.
✵ Night-time is when we are most vulnerable.
✵ Night-time is when ’normal’ people sleep.
One simple choice has an enormous impact on our experience of the scene and our understanding; it impacts on the staging and the dramatic context, yet students tend towards thinking that noticing an oxymoron is better, perhaps more nuanced, than commenting on the fundamental choice between night and day. There are endless choices to be discussed when looking at scenes: inside or outside, personal or private, social (relating to people and relationships between people) or political (relating to the governing of people), etc. I like to wrap these up in one simple PowerPoint. I use it every time we look at a scene:
What choices has Shakespeare made in this scene?
✵ inside vs outside
✵ day vs night
✵ home vs away
✵ public vs private
✵ soliloquy vs dialogue
✵ action vs inaction
✵ political vs social vs religious
✵ men vs women vs men and women
✵ positive vs negative
✵ comic vs tragic vs serious
✵ long vs short
✵ plot-driven vs not plot-driven
✵ family vs friends vs enemies vs lovers
✵ blank verse vs prose vs both
After we have read a scene, I get them to go through the choices made by Shakespeare. Here’s an example for the opening scene of Hamlet.
outside — night — home — public — dialogue — inaction — political — men — negative — serious — long — plot-driven — friends — blank verse
Compare that with the opening of Romeo and Juliet:
outside — day — away — public — dialogue — action — social — men — negative — tragic — long — plot-driven — enemies — blank verse
It’s really very rewarding indeed when students start talking about a scene as being purely plot-driven and, from there, explain how the next is focused on relationship building. All too often, studying a play seems to be about remembering the plot; this approach, however, helps students to explore the important choices and the meaning behind them. When they look at the staging, they see how the plot and subplots link. They see how the use of short, plot-driven scenes speed the play along. They also see how Shakespeare alternates comedic and serious scenes. Choices don’t stand alone; for Shakespeare, the pattern or combination creates the desired effect.
Ideally, we want students to see the whole text and the way in which it is structured, and this approach allows them to do this actively as they read. Getting them to see the change from scene to scene is vital. Asking students how this scene differs from the last helps them to see the purpose. As mentioned previously, you sometimes see things in juxtaposition that you miss in isolation.