Drama Techniques and Teaching Shakespeare to Senior Students
In recent years a striking emphasis has been given to the teaching of
English as a foreign language in Russia.
We also place great value on teaching English literature and this
subject has been included in our school curriculum as a special aspect. Through learning
literature, students can appreciate the beauty of the world. Literature stirs their
imagination and develops inquiring minds.
Learning literature helps people to make connections between life and
literature itself and eventually helps them to appreciate it as a world-wide phenomenon.
A considerable part of our school curriculum is devoted to
W. Shakespeare and his creative activities. “Shakespeare lives!” So writes his
most eminent biographer S. Shoenbaum in the prologue to Shakespeare: The
Globe and the World. And the evidence is all around us. Alongside the Greek classics,
Shakespeare’s words and works offer a cultural treasure chest from which people have
been drawing for more than three and a half centuries. In Russia, Shakespeare’s plays
and sonnets are cherished and adored. W. Shakespeare continues to maintain his position as
one of the most frequently performed playwrights.
Shakespeare’s dramas achieve their impact largely through imagery –
language that appeals to the senses in vividly emotional ways. While teaching
Shakespeare’s works we try to provide our senior students with enough background to
begin their studies. The teacher compiles a so-called “portfolio” for his students.
The “portfolio” contains a bibliography of sources which help our senior students to
complete the tasks and to do some research for their projects. Students are supposed to
find additional sources in order to thoroughly research the topic.
The books contained in the portfolio will give the students a certain
background to begin their studies. The first tasks are the preliminary research phase for
students’ major projects. Students are supposed to select tasks which appeal to their
interests. They are ready to pursue their major projects as soon as they have completed
their first tasks.
Having accumulated a fund of knowledge from a variety of sources, they
have probably become intrigued by some aspects. Then they are supposed to select some
aspect(s) of their topics they would like to learn more thoroughly.
The end products will probably take the forms of students’ essays,
creative writing (papers), discussions, and story telling. Some episodes of
Shakespeare’s plays are to be acted out at school assemblies.
The greatest literary critic Samuel Johnson wrote in his “Preface to
Shakespeare”: “Shakespeare is, above all writers, at least above all modern writers,
the poet of nature, the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and
of life.
His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places
unpracticed by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions which
can operate but upon small numbers or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary
opinions, they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always
supply and observations will always find.”
Shakespeare has no heroes, his scenes are occupied only by men who act
and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same
occasions.
We suggest that our senior students should do some research on the
following points:
1. Shakespeare rarely invented his own stories and plots. Collect
information about his sources and compile a reference list.
2. Discover why we know relatively little about Shakespeare’s life
including the actual date of his birth.
3. Record at least ten events in Shakespeare’s life which we know
about from contemporary records.
4. Although women attended plays in the 16th century England, females
never appeared on stage. Determine the basis of this custom.
5. Costumes were an item of heavy expense in staging a new play. As a
costume designer, plan a wardrobe for Juliet and Romeo.
I am deeply fascinated by Shakespeare’s literary works and try to
involve my students in the world of his creations. Had Shakespeare written no plays at
all, he would still have an immense reputation as a poet. He wrote altogether 154 sonnets,
their speaker is male and the chief subject is love. Among their other admirable features,
the sonnets show how well Shakespeare handled the difficult sonnet form.
Traditionally, our senior students start learning poetry with Sonnet
No. 130.
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak; yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think by love
As rare, as any she belied with false compare.
This sonnet ridicules the fashionable excess being committed by some of
Shakespeare’s fellow poets; he imitates the exaggerated metaphors they were using to
describe the woman they loved. The following tasks are suggested to our students to be
fulfilled:
1. Analyzing the poem: Shakespeare uses the classic objects of
comparison in describing his mistress. What are they?
2. Describe what the speaker’s mistress might look like. Which
descriptions do you find comical?
3. Sonnet 130 is a witty parody of love poems popular in
Shakespeare’s day. You might write you own parody of love songs.
Senior students are supposed to learn some sonnets by heart both in
Russian and in English.
For instance, Sonnet No. 29 is actually a single sentence. Here the
speaker describes how he rids himself of such ugly emotions as envy, self-pity,
self-hatred and the dismal certainly that everybody else is luckier than he is.
After reading and learning the sonnets, students probably will try
their skills at writing their own sonnets in the Shakespearean pattern.
They also discuss the following points:
1. Name the traits of others that the speaker is envious of.
2. Which line carries the “turn” of the sonnet?
3. What memory changes the speaker’s state of mind?
There has always been much speculation about the biographical meaning
of the “story” of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but no one has ever produced a convincing
theory connecting it with the facts of Shakespeare’s life. The situations and
relationships suggested in the sonnets are best understood as the fictional means through
which Shakespeare explores universal questions about time and death, about beauty and
moral integrity, about love and about poetry itself.
What sort of man was Shakespeare? This is a very hard question to
answer because he left no letters, diaries or other private writings containing his
personal views; instead, he left us his plays. We cannot say that Shakespeare approved of
evil because he created murderers, we cannot say he believed in fatalism because he
created fatalists, or admired flattery because he created flattered. All these would be
naive and contradictory reactions to the plays. Shakespeare’s characters represent such
a vast range of human behavior and attitudes that they must be products of his careful
observations and fertile imagination rather than extensions of himself.
“This morning brings a cloudy peace.
The sun, out of sorrow, will not show its head.
Go! We’ll talk more about these sad things.
Some of you will be pardoned and some of you will be punished.
There never was a story of more sorrow than this one of Juliet and her Romeo.”
If the plays of Shakespeare are any indication, the “generation
gap” caused as much trouble in Elizabethan England as it does in the present-day world.
Problems between parents and children are important dramatic elements in Shakespeare. In Romeo
and Juliet, Shakespeare pays little attention to Romeo’s troubles with his father
but devotes considerable stage time to Juliet defiance of hers. Old Capulet wants Juliet
to marry the rich eligible Count Paris. The moment he learns that she is rejecting the
marriage, his reaction is violent in the extreme. If she will not wed Paris, he says, she
can “hang, beg, starve, die in the streets”. The practical expedience of age is no
match for the passion of youth.
Romeo and Juliet takes place in two worlds: the practical,
feuding, violence-filled world of day, and the hopeful, romantic world of night.
And Romeo’s first words to describe Juliet make it even clearer that
night has fallen and true love is ascendant:
“Oh, she teaches the torches to burn brightly!
She hangs upon the face of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiopi’s ear…”
Romeo and Juliet is especially exciting and interesting for
senior students because it is a love story. In his tragedy Shakespeare tells the tale of
“star-crossed” lovers who dare to love, despite the hatred between their families.
Both Juliet and Romeo are rebels willing to give up everything – family, country,
friends for their all-absorbing love. “Passion lends them power” and this power gives
them courage to defy their feuding families and to brave even the terrors of the grave.
A study guide, recommended to our senior students may be as follows:
1. Define the genre: drama type of plot: “Romantic Tragedy”. Name
the principal characters.
2. Try to become thoroughly familiar with the characters: Do they seem
like real people? What motivates them? What problems do they face? How do they solve them?
Could the characters have acted differently?
3. Analyze Romeo’s personality, specifically his weakness or
character flaws. How does his personality contribute to the tragedy?
Analyze Juliet’s personality, her weakness or character flaws. How
does her personality contribute to the tragedy? Which do you think played a more important
role in bringing about the tragedy? Explain.
4. Describe how Romeo and Juliet discover each other’s identity. “I
saw him too early when I didn’t know him, and now I realize who he is too late”.
(Act I, scene 5)
These lines summarize the whole dilemma of the tragedy.
5. Characterize Mercutio, a Romeo’s friend; Benvolio, Romeo’s
cousin; and Tybalt, nephew to Lady Capulette.
6. What elements in Scene 4 foreshadow the fatality of Romeo and
Juliet’s love?
Tasks for Compositions:
1. Rewrite a short story in which the central conflict is one of race
relations.
2. Reread Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. Contrast the sonnet with
Romeo’s comments on Rosaline and Juliet. Compare the sonnet to Mercutio’s remarks
about love.
Read Shakespeare’s other love tragedies.
William Shakespeare wrote the greatest dramatic works the world has
ever seen.
An actor personating the character moves us deeply, because we
recognize a truth within fiction. As it was suggested by the motto of the Globe theatre
itself, the whole world is a theatre.
Ben Johnson was right then, when he prefaced the first collected
edition of Shakespeare’s plays with the words “he was not of an age, but for all
time!”
By Levshova Galina,
School No. 1245, Moscow
|