How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Predicting how shakespeare will write – think like a playwright
How to teach shakespeare

Every child is a wannabe playwright, poet and author. Every child has this potential. An underestimated question in the classroom is, ’What would you do in the writer’s shoes?’ We ask students to predict what will happen in the plot, yet we rarely ask them what they’d write. I think every English teacher has had to deal with a student asking if Shakespeare really intended to do something or not. Unless we are able to conduct a successful seance, we will never know. So we guess. But we try to make our guesses intelligent.

Take the following situation: a teenage girl falls in love with a boy from a family that her own despises. No guesses where it is from. EastEnders. Only joking. It is the premise of Romeo and Juliet. Ask a student, ’How would you introduce such a story to an audience?’ They enjoy coming up with ideas. It’s a natural human trait which is undervalued in the classroom.

They might come up with ideas like:

✵ Start with the girl — build the relationship up with her. We identify with her as the protagonist and see her fall for this boy from the wrong family.

✵ Start with the boy — build the relationship up with him. We identify with him as the protagonist and see him fall for this girl.

✵ Start with the parents — show how controlling and powerful they are — they come first.

Students present their options and evaluate the best approach. When presented with the playwright’s choice, they can understand why the final version was chosen over the others. Then throw in the fact that Shakespeare starts the story by giving a plot overview in the prologue and then writes a scene featuring the parents, followed by the introduction of Romeo. Why would you make that choice as a playwright?

Two households, both alike in dignity

(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life:

Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

The fearful passage of their death-marked love,

And the continuance of their parents’ rage,

Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,

Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;

The which, if you with patient ears attend,

What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.³

Why start with the boy first? Why not with the girl? It is better to start with a list of possibilities than explore one choice in isolation. Evaluation is deemed a high-level skill, yet you need to see how choices relate in order to evaluate properly. This approach allows you to do that.

Another approach I use involves providing alternatives. These are some of the choices I’d explore with the prologue:

✵ reveal the ending vs don’t reveal the ending

✵ teenagers vs adults

✵ fight between two families vs fight between two countries

✵ sad introduction vs happy introduction

✵ a small speech vs characters talking to each other

✵ refers to death vs refers only to love

The students are provided with this list of choices, and they have to discuss why Shakespeare went with the choice underlined instead of the other option. The beauty of this approach is that it forces students to discuss the reasoning behind a specific choice. They might explore how revealing the ending creates a sense of expectation or narrative drive to the story; we know how the story ends, but we don’t how it gets to that point. They might also explore how a sense of doom touches every action, or inaction, in the play, making the audience ponder what the fatal cause of their untimely demise is; their lives are now soaked in misery, making any happiness bittersweet.

The next step is to get students to think of another possibility for each one. Shakespeare chose teenagers and not adults, but what could his third option be? Fairies? Animals? Pensioners? Each option considered helps students to understand why the original decision was made. If fairies or animals were chosen, then we’d lose a sense of realism. Therefore, Shakespeare may have been wanting to create a realistic, relatable and common experience for the audience rather than a playful and unrealistic one. But, of course, we know Shakespeare was retelling an already popular story and that the choice in question wasn’t his own. Through comparisons students are able to explore meaning, which is very hard to do when exploring a writer’s decisions in isolation.