Shakespeare’s birthday is tomorrow. In honor of the famous playwright’s birth, I thought I would reflect on how I’ve grown to love the bard and how that’s helped me introduce better practices to teach my students to also love his writing.I had a difficult time getting through my Shakespeare class in college. Don’t get me wrong, my professor was great and definitely a Shakespeare fanatic, but I was never really taught HOW to read Shakespeare. I also didn’t seem to have enough time or knowledge & resources to plow through a full play in a week on my own at home. The reading pace was too strenuous for me, and I found myself lost and falling behind, never gaining an appreciation for what Shakespeare has contributed to the literary world.
It wasn’t until I myself was asked to teach Shakespeare that I took the time to understand his longevity. Shakespeare is still famous centuries later because his themes cross those centuries. His characters still exist in real life today. The human condition and universal understandings have not changed in over 400 years. He just wrote in a “different” language.
Learning to love Shakespeare for me and my students meant overcoming his language. One of the best techniques I’ve ever done for my students is demonstrate how Shakespeare’s words are sometimes in a different order in the sentence than what we expect today. The trick was finding the subject and verb and then putting them in that order. Take the sentence: I lost my homework. Then write that four different ways, using the same words. My homework I lost. Lost my homework I. The idea quickly became clear to my students that even though the words were in a different order, the meaning of the sentence was the same. They just had to figure out where he placed the subject and verb and order them to make sense.
After students had some techniques to read Shakespeare on their own and understand his sentence structure, we were able to work on archaic language. I simply gave students a handout of some of the most common archaic words/language they would encounter while reading the play. Also, while reading aloud as a class, students who had completed homework or answered quiz questions at the beginning of class quickly and correctly “won” the use of a side-by-side modern translation for the day. It came with a catch – we counted on them to help us interpret passages we read but didn’t understand because they had the modern English translation in front of them.Once students get past the fact that Shakespeare wrote a bit differently than what we’re used to today, they can learn to love and appreciate his characters and themes that are still relevant today. I really wonder if he had any inkling how famous he would be today, and how widely taught, performed and read he is.
