How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Context
How to teach shakespeare

Context is a tricky aspect to teach as students easily slip into chucking in (cutting and pasting) large pieces of information. Essays can become a list of regurgitated facts. I find the teaching of context is, therefore, best served by keeping the information concise. If students are limited to the short piece of contextual information you’ve provided, they have to work hard to explain its relevance. Below is a list I often use with Years 10 and 11 when teaching Romeo and Juliet.

Women in 1595

✵ Women had no power and were reliant on their fathers and husbands for all necessities. They were the property of the men, who could do what they liked with them; women belonged to men.

✵ Women couldn’t own property.

✵ Queen Elizabeth I did not marry for fear a man would have more power than her.

✵ Women could not vote.

✵ Women had no legal rights.

✵ Women were never schooled. Education was seen as unnecessary and pointless for women.

✵ A woman’s only role in society was to marry. This was organised by her father.

✵ Marriages tended to be based around financial security. Love wasn’t necessarily a deciding factor. Marriage helped the male’s family secure money through a dowry or helped to build alliances and profitable connections between families.

✵ Marriage from the age of 12 was acceptable. This was more common in rich families than in poor families.

The key words are underlined — these are the linking points. Students have to remember these words only — belonged, property, power, vote, rights, never schooled, only role, financial security, alliances and 12. The words become sticking points to screw their courage, I mean ideas, to.

Lady Capulet therefore plays a minor role in the play as her station in life was solely to support her husband. Her interactions on stage are only in relation to her role in the marriage — which was to do Capulet’s bidding.

The less contextual information you give, the more the students have to work on embellishing it. By this I mean keep the individual points short rather than reduce the volume of ideas. I tend to repeat these facts and regularly set them as questions. What does age 12 signify for a female? Another approach to teaching context is simply to look at areas of difference. A nice way to do this is with a little grid which students use to explore how each aspect is different to the present.

The Elizabethan view of society

What was the Elizabethan view of …?

Getting students to see that the rules of life can be different during different periods of time is important, though the similarities are important too. Take gender in Romeo and Juliet. Students might come up with the following points:

✵ Men were quick to fight and use force if necessary.

✵ Men liked to wind people up.

✵ Men were worried about losing respect or being publicly embarrassed.

✵ Men tended to focus on sexual relations rather than love.

✵ Men were distant from their parents.

Now that we have a set of statements based on the play, students can discuss whether that element or characteristic has increased or decreased over time. Shakespeare was writing about the human condition, so the experiences are similar to today’s, but may have changed perspective. Take the ’men were quick to fight’ statement. That might be true nowadays, but it is probably less common and would now, more often than not, be fuelled by alcohol.

Context isn’t solely about facts. It is about ideas too. The problem students have is that the past and the present can be seen as binary opposites. But there were men, women, marriages, old and young people in the past and, heavens, they exist in the present too. It is more important to see how men have changed and how they have not. What has changed are the social rules. Humans aren’t fundamentally different, they are just living by a different set of rules.

Teach students the rules governing a society. Take the following ideas about class in Edwardian Britain in An Inspector Calls.

✵ A poor person has no manners/class/sophistication/education.

✵ A poor person can never become wealthy.

✵ The poor and the rich should never mix — in friendships/relationships/work.

✵ A poor person should be grateful for what the rich provide them.

✵ The rich don’t want to see or hear the poor; they just need them to do a job.

✵ The rich employ the poor.

✵ A rich person can sack or punish a poor employee without consequences.

Understanding the rules of an age is incredibly important for understanding the context. The class system is evident in all British texts to some level. So too is the American Dream in the work of American writers. Both are notions that govern the ways in which people work, act, think and believe. But, like all rules, there’s always someone willing to defy them. When teaching context, it is helpful to use phrases like ’majority’ and ’minority’ so that you can get across to students that not everybody followed the rules, and when they didn’t, this led to social change. Additionally, it is important to refer to ’shades’ and ’continuums’ because nothing is ever consistent, constant, clear or concrete. Masculinity is a continuum and Tybalt and Romeo are at opposite ends of it at the start of the play.

1 W. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1992 [1599]), pp. 39—40.

2 For further examples and explanations see: https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/LanguageCompanion/ThemesAndTopics.aspx?TopicId=39.

3 W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1992 [1595]), p. 35.