Teaching Shakespeare

One of the great, and honestly unexpected, delights of teaching literature to high schoolers is the opportunity to spend more time with Shakespeare.  In the past two years, I taught Merchant of Venice and Hamlet...this year I'm adding Twelfth Night and Lear to the mix.

I've revisited John Barton's terrific "Playing Shakespeare" series (even bought the DVDs), spent some quality time with Harold Bloom, read up on what we do and don't actually know about the Bard himself, and watched many versions of several plays.

I hadn't spent much time with Shakespeare since I began writing -- before that, my encounters with his work came more from an actor's perspective.  And I'd never had to turn around and articulate to kids what they should look for.  What follows is a brief and relatively inarticulate list of things I've been seeing...much of it probably review, for any playwrights looking at the blog.

1.  Shakespeare, more than most of us now, interwove two or more plots in many of his plays.  Sometimes those plots themselves were pretty simple -- by interweaving them, he created some of that complexity of story and theme for which he's so revered.  Lear and his daughters, yes, but ALSO Gloucester and his sons...it's the two stories together that give the play its power.

2.  He really had fun with his antagonists -- they weren't just obstacles to his heroes, in fact, you'd be forgiven for seeing the bad guys as the heroes in several of his plays.  Claudius gets his day in the sun.  Shylock is one of the most compelling characters ever written, even when we hate him.

3.  He developed character and relationship through language.  Sure, we all do this -- but he took it to extremes.  It's wild, the degree to which you can use verse vs. prose in his plays to mark the action, the relationships.  The specificity of it, of his use of meter and broken meter to teach us how to read a scene, is staggering.

4.  He knew how to use direct address, and he knew how to use spectacle...he didn't, for the most part, OVERuse them.

5.  He was prolific as all hell...but it was clear that he (and, well, most of his contemporaries) didn't spend his energy creating stories from scratch...he was a scavenger who would find a story worth telling, and then figure out how to tell it in the most compelling way.  He didn't use all his energy creating plot...he used it to refine, expand, challenge, entertain.  To quote Dietz "a good story well told is always radical."  Didn't matter if he didn't come up with the story.

6.  He knew how to blow a play open with a well-placed juxtaposition.  Why is the gravedigger scene in Hamlet so crucial?  Because it gets us out of the vacuum of the castle, and reminds us that there are people other than royals and courtiers who have a stake in the story.  It reminds us what the events mean to the people of Denmark.  It reminds us that life, too, is fleeting...it brings in history and class in a whole new way, and quickly, and then gets us back to the task at hand.  With most of those scenes in a Shakespeare play where you say "why the hell do I need that scene," imagine what the play would be like without it.  Usually, the answer is "smaller.  Less ambitious."  Note:  these are a lot of the scenes that, in contemporary theater, are most in danger of being "developed" out of the script...because they're expensive (if they require an additional actor) and tangential (if they only appear once).

7.  He knew how to write a good fight scene.

8.  He knew that plays could be deep but that he also had to entertain his audience...with a good sword fight...or some mistaken identities...or some double-cross-dressing...