Shakespeare Course: Which plays and other resources?

[kokotg]

I'm planning on doing a year of Shakespeare with my 10th and 8th graders this year, so I'm frantically trying to pull together resources and figure out what we're doing. We're going to start with A Midsummer Night's Dream (there's a performance of it happening next month near us, so that works out well), but I'm not positive where to go from there. Which plays would you do or have you had success with with your kids? And how many is it realistic to try to read in a year? I'm thinking of 5, with breaks in between to do sonnets and to read some non-fiction about Shakespeare and England at the time and/or some contemporary works based on or inspired by Shakespeare. My tentative list is Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and....probably not another tragedy. The Tempest? Merchant of Venice? Whichever Richard it is who's a cartoon villain--I can never remember? I'm saving Hamlet for when they're older, I think. 

And does anyone have suggestions for either non-fiction about Shakespeare or contemporary works based on Shakespeare? I've found some lists, but I haven't read any of them, so I don't know what's good and/or appropriate for late middle school/early high school. Ideas for movies (either the actual plays or modern retellings like My Own Private Idaho, but not My Own Private Idaho) or anything else you've got also appreciated! 

[Miss Tick]

I love the Isaac Asimov book for getting some insight of my own before we dive into a play.

[EmilyGF]

I love the Tempest because it was his last play and deep while also hilariously funny. We had fun with Julius Caesar this last year. It has some great monologues that you notice everywhere. I showed my kids the spoof on it from Robin Hood Men in Tights after they memorized the "Friends, Romans, Countrymen..." monologue.

Most kids I know who know a lot of Shakespeare think Romeo and Juliet is lame.

Emily

[Lori D.]

I typically see these as the most frequent Shakespeare plays to pop up in high school classes:
- tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet
- comedies: Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Tempest, Taming of the Shrew
- histories: Julius Caesar, Henry V

When our 2 DSs were in high school, we read/dug into Hamlet and Macbeth. We watched live plays or film versions of Midsummer Night's Dream (live play), Much Ado About Nothing (films, 1993 & 2012), The Merchant of Venice (film, 2004 -- a few n*pples seen in the background), and The Taming of the Shrew (TV/stage version, 1982 with John Cleese as Petruchio) -- as well as a few of the "loosely-based" films I listed below -- and DSs enjoyed all of them.

A few possible study resources:
- Folger Shakespeare Library -- free teacher lessons
- Brightest Heaven of Invention: Christian Guide to 6 Shakespeare Plays (Leithart)
- parallel Shakespeare materials -- esp. the teacher guides and student workbooks, as well as good info in the parallel text books
- Lightning Lit 1-semester Shakespeare guides -- tragedies + sonnets; comedies + sonnets

A few possible "go-along" books:
- Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead -- play by Tom Stoppard about these 2 characters from Hamlet
- William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily A New Hope (Doescher) -- original Star Wars story rendered into Shakespearean iambic pentameter
- Shakespeare Stealer (and sequels) (Blackwood) -- YA/middle school historical fiction about a teen boy working for Shakespeare
- Station 11 (St. John Mandel) -- sci-fi; post apocalyptic world and a troop of Shakespeare actors
- The Night Circus (Morgenstern) -- fantastical world; star-crossed lovers slightly like Romeo and Juliet
- Daughter of Time (Tey) -- not Shakespeare-based, but about Richard III, and solving a mystery about him -- WELL written!

Not so much novels, but some classic films are unique versions of, or are loosely based on, specific Shakespeare plays:
- The Tempest = Forbidden Planet (1956)
- Romeo & Juliet = West Side Story (1961)
- Henry IV = My Own Private Idaho (1991) 
- Macbeth = Throne of Blood (1957) -- subtitled; Japanese 1700s samurai
- Hamlet = The Bad Sleep Well (1960) -- subtitled; Japanese 1960s gangster
- Twelfth Night AND Romeo & Juliet = Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Edited July 17, 2019 by Lori D.

[LLucy]

I wanted to mention that Crash Course has the sonnets, and The Great Courses has 3 sets of lectures: Shakespeare: The Word and Action, How to Read and Understand Shakespeare, and Shakespeare: Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.  I think a couple are on sale right now, and all 3 are older and likely to be available through your library.

I have done Midsummer, Hamlet, and Macbeth with my boys, elementary through high school, each a success, although film choice can be tricky for that age range.  I remember a scene or two with Ophelia we could have done without, and there was nudity (covered not well with green makeup?) in The Royal Shakespeare Company's Midsummer that I was not expecting. Macbeth pairs well with Halloween. -- LL

And avoid Prospero's Books (1991), I remember that one from my own youth!

Edited July 17, 2019 by LLucy
I just remembered

[Lori D.]

Forgot to mention -- the PBS series Shakespeare Uncovered. The current season is the 3rd, so other plays are covered in seasons 1 and 2.

Edited July 17, 2019 by Lori D.

[royspeed]

kokotg:

Midsummer Night's Dream is not a bad place to start. — A few thoughts on resources:

Introducing the writer & his works. This, I think, is the single biggest missing resource for teaching Shakespeare to our teens, i.e., a really great introduction to the writer and his works that puts his accomplishments into some kind of perspective. — I try to give students such a perspective in my own Shakespeare courses, and it's really challenging. Several years ago I wrote the following article, which was my first stab at such an introduction:
Why All Our Students Must Study Shakespeare

Criticism. One of the very best works of Shakespeare criticism that I'm aware of is Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery (1936). — I give my own students excerpts from her book, both to enhance their understanding of the plays we're reading and to present models of really fine literary criticism. My students actually get excited about her writing — not something you often see with literary criticism; to them, her writing seems so fresh and alive that they can't believe her book came out in 1936.

Shakespeare on film. I'm teaching Twelfth Night this summer and stumbled on one of the best film versions of Shakespeare I've ever come across: it's a performance in the replica of The Globe in London and features, among others, Stephen Fry and Mark Rylance. It's one-hundred-percent period costuming, and it's performed in the Elizabethan manner, with men playing all the roles. It's so so good... — At $30, the DVD is expensive, but you can probably find it at your library:
Globe on Screen performance of Twelfth Night

8 hours ago, EmilyGF said:

Most kids I know who know a lot of Shakespeare think Romeo and Juliet is lame.

I think Romeo & Juliet may be the single best play for introducing Shakespeare to teens, partly because it contains a great deal of beautiful verse, and partly because the entire first half is wickedly funny — provided that you understand what Shakespeare is up to. (I've never had a student in my Romeo & Juliet series emerge from that course thinking of the play as "lame.") 

Good luck to you and your students.

—Roy Speed

[EmilyGF]

27 minutes ago, royspeed said:

I think Romeo & Juliet may be the single best play for introducing Shakespeare to teens, partly because it contains a great deal of beautiful verse, and partly because the entire first half is wickedly funny — provided that you understand what Shakespeare is up to. (I've never had a student in my Romeo & Juliet series emerge from that course thinking of the play as "lame.") 

Good luck to you and your students.

—Roy Speed

The kids I am referring to had been reading Shakespeare since age 6. Maybe that's the problem? And they already had favorites.

Edited July 17, 2019 by EmilyGF

[J-rap]

The Twelfth Night was a favorite of ours at that age.

[Homemama2]

Thanks for this post!  I'm taking notes.  There are some great ideas here.

One thing we've done in the past that worked well was using a version for kids for the first time through so they understood the storyline (Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, Bruce Coville books or Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by Edith Nesbit).  This really helped in middle school.  That usually only took a class period to read, then we used Folger's books to read together and would watch a play (live or movie) either before or after reading the actual play.  We haven't always done this however, and actually once they had experienced a couple of the plays, they started getting use to the language enough that they could follow the storyline on their own.

Mine really liked Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, MacBeth and Hamlet.  We also watched a version of Romeo and Juliet (2013) that was on Netflix at the time that they really liked.  (Not sure if it was entirely accurate, but stuck fairly close to the storyline, the costumes were good and we really enjoyed it)

I was thinking I might try Taming of the Shrew and watch Ten Things I Hate About You w/ Heath Ledger because my kids are huge Heath Ledger fans (I have to preview this because I haven't seen it in ages.  I do know there was teenage partying in it, but can't remember anything else including if there are many connections to the Shakespeare play)  I have a feeling this particular play can lead to ALOT of discussion 😂.  

Edited July 17, 2019 by Homemama2

[kokotg]

Thanks everyone--I'm doing a lot of bookmarking!!

Re: Romeo and Juliet...I did it with my oldest (and a friend who was joining in for lit that year) in 9th grade; they both thought Romeo himself was pretty lame, but enjoyed the play overall. I hate to include it just because everyone reads it, but....I do kind of think they need to read it because everyone reads it 🙂 . It's also fairly accessible, and there's a Crash Course about it, and, of course, the Claire Danes/Leo DiCaprio movie is an important Gen X touchstone 😉 . 

 

[Emerald Stoker]

We've had such fun with Shakespeare--I think it's great that you're doing this, and wonderful that you can get to at least one live production! Over the years, we've studied and seen live fifteen of the plays (multiple productions of some of them), and I think the more you do, the richer the experience for your students--you're going to have a great year!

Over several years, we've seen live As You Like It, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Pericles, A Winter's Tale, All's Well that Ends Well, Love's Labour's Lost, Othello, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Much Ado about Nothing...and we're hoping to make it to Julius Caesar and Coriolanus this year. We've enjoyed all of them--I think it's not a bad idea to plan what you read around what you can see live, or which ones have a filmed version you'd really like to share with them--it's much more alive that way than it is on the page. (When we read them, everyone picks parts and we read aloud--that helps, too.) The most useful book about the plays we have read is Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare After All. https://marjoriegarber.com/Shakespeare-After-All.php

Another fun thing to try might be to read plays by some of Shakespeare's contemporaries; we read six of them one year, as follows:

-Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday
-George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho
-Ben Jonson, Every Man in his Humour
-Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
-Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl
-Francis Beaumont, Knight of the Burning Pestle

Those were all very enjoyable, too, and gave us a little more sense of the context. We read an interesting book by Stanley Wells called Shakespeare & Co.: Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, Middleton, Fletcher, and the Other Players in His Story. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/26/highereducation.biography

Hope that helps! Have a fantastic year!

 

Edited July 22, 2019 by Emerald Stoker
added links

[Lori D.]

4 hours ago, Homemama2 said:

... One thing we've done in the past that worked well was using a version for kids for the first time through so they understood the storyline (Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, Bruce Coville books or Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by Edith Nesbit).

The Shakespeare: Animated Tales are also great for this -- they are 25-minute abridged versions, using all-original language, but streamlined. A good first viewing, so you get the idea of who is who and what the overall plot line is, so then you can focus on the language and ideas in the play.
 

4 hours ago, Homemama2 said:

...I was thinking I might try Taming of the Shrew and watch Ten Things I Hate About You w/ Heath Ledger because my kids are huge Heath Ledger fans (I have to preview this because I haven't seen it in ages.  I do know there was teenage partying in it, but can't remember anything else including if there are many connections to the Shakespeare play)...

There was a fair amount of 4-letter words, and some talk about s*x (no actual s*x scenes). There were a fair number of connections to Taming of the Shrew. Health Ledger is good, but I thought that overall the movie was a good deal weaker than I thought it would be, based on the hype about it being a modern teen version of Shakespeare's play. JMO! (:D

If watching a film version of Taming of the Shrew, I love the BBC TV version with John Cleese version, because in the ending scene, it is very clear that he did it all because he really cared for Katherine for who she is, and the unexpected bonus is that she truly cares for him too, which touches him. And it was a real pleasure to see Cleese, known for his outrageous humor in Monty Python, pull off a serious role and do it well. 

The Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor film version comes off that it is because he was after her money, and getting to be lusty with her because they're married is an unexpected bonus for him. Ick.

Edited July 17, 2019 by Lori D.

[JumpedIntoTheDeepEndFirst]

Two resources for teaching Shakespeare are Gibson's Teaching Shakespeare and Shakespeare Set Free from the Folger.  There is also How To Teach Your Children Shakespeare. My Favorite copies of the plays are paperbacks done by the Folger, they make regular appearances in used book stores and library sales.

(The Amazon links are just for reference purposes, I'm not profiting from them.) Shakespeare Set Free is a whole set, I just linked one volume.

Some of the most fun my kids had was doing read-throughs of the plays with another homeschooling family. We drew lots, assigned parts at random, stocked up some drinks/snacks/pizza, nabbed a few props/costume items just for fun and performed for ourselves (parents were as active as the kids). 

I highly recommend combining live performances and video performances. It can be helpful to watch one version of a play before the read through and another after. Another route we took was to watch a more traditional film of the play first (think anything by Brannagh, Gibson's Hamlet, Elizabeth Taylor's Taming of the Shrew) and then watched a more contemporary or complete resetting of the play (Stewart's Macbeth, McKellen's Richard III, Tennant's Hamlet, and one of my personal favorites, Tennant and Tate's version of Much Ado About Nothing as a romp through the 80's). Can't leave out a recommendation for the Hollow Crown series either. You can also go with stories being told that parallel but don't use the exact Shakespearean dialogue such as King of Texas. Depending on the ages of the kids or your family's personal sensitivities, I found the British comedy series Upstart Crow to be hysterical. It is available on YouTube last I knew and while sometimes bawdy (lots of  Shakespeare sounding cuss words that aren't used currently, and many if not all are actually made up, but the parallels to modern English are unmistakable).

Also, I recommend this video to anyone studying Shakespeare, it is a fascinating look at how language/pronunciation has changed and how that has removed so many of the double entendres and rhymes. 

There are a variety of documentaries on Shakespeare's life, some studies of his gravesite, and several (including two Frontline specials) on the authorship question if that rabbit hole is of interest to anyone.

 

 

[Farrar]

I really like Lori's list of the plays most commonly studied in high school... except... I cannot imagine any high school classroom reading Taming of the Shrew as a single or one of a couple Shakespeares right now in this climate. That speech at the end. Oy. I know there are wink, wink, nudge, nudge ways to stage it that help mitigate it a lot, and obviously Ten Things I Hate About You is a teenage take that modernizes it, but still. Like, I can't imagine what teacher would pick it as "the" Shakespeare in a high school class. Or "the" comedy. Even in a class where you'll only read a few comedies... I think with modern eyes that it's easily as difficult as Measure for Measure, which is quite dark.

Besides, having seen what schools actually perform at the Folger Festival several times - it's As You Like It, hands down. There's wrestling. And poems in trees!

Edited July 20, 2019 by Farrar

[Lucy the Valiant]

If you wander into Richard III territory, please give Cumberbatch's Hollow Crown version at least a glance. 😄 It has forever colored our family's intersection of Shakespeare and chess.

We did a "light" year of Shakespeare a couple years back, using plays that lined up (loosely) with Middle Ages history. We invited a handful of our favorite teens over and asked them to (A) have a glancing familiarity with the play by either reading Lamb's version, watching the 25-minute animated version linked above, or knowing the basic plot line & characters from some other source, (B) bring a play-related snack (these were often hilarious), and (C) either a show and tell item *OR* a costume. We briefly and casually discussed the play while eating, and then watched a movie version of it, and then called it done. Some of the show and tell items were hilarious, some were extremely in-depth (a detailed family tree of the Lancaster & York families, color coded and with caricature sketches comes to mind), and all were appreciated. [These were kids ages 12-17.]

Our method was certainly not "in-depth literary analysis" by any means, but boy, did we have FUN! And for kids who respond well to the "match light" approach (aka 2 of my teens and at least 3 of the invited friends), this has been particularly successful in the long run by pulling them into the plot & time period & social commentary. 

It's not for everyone, but - it may be for someone. 🙂

[Lori D.]

9 hours ago, Farrar said:

... I think with modern eyes that it's easily as difficult as Measure for Measure, which is quite dark

Measure for Measure -- yes, yikes!

And Merchant of Venice is dark and difficult in a different way: the incredibly brutal treatment of Shylock at the end of the play -- the Jewish moneylender who was seeking justice for being blown off and mistreated by wealthy gentile boys, finally snaps at the poor treatment of Jews in Europe for centuries, and attempts to get a pound of flesh in revenge -- only to have the court force him to convert to Christianity and have to watch his daughter, his only remaining family member, marry a gentile. That's rough.