Shakespeare Reviews

Home Education Magazine: July/August 2005

Performing Shakespeare: A Way to Learn

“Young people should not study Shakespeare’s plays,” writes Robert Sugarman, “they should do them.” Sugarman’s Performing Shakespeare: A Way to Learn (Mountainside Press, 2005) is a fascinating account – crammed with addictive anecdotes - of how kids ages six to eighteen become committed, impassioned, and highly literate Shakespeare lovers.

The book examines four different (but related) Shakespeare programs in depth. The first, initiated by Lois Burdett in Stratford, Ontario, introduces second-graders to Shakespeare’s plays. (Check out Burdett’s Shakespeare Can Be Fun series; these are terrific short versions of the plays for elementary-level students, illustrated with children’s drawings. See http://www.fireflybooks.com/Kids/Shakespeare.html.)

The Real People Theater, established by teacher Stephen Haff in New York’s inner city, turns ghetto kids into Shakespeare-savvy writers and performers; Rafe Esquith’s fifth-graders in Los Angeles – known as the Hobart Shakespeareans - put on challenging uncut Shakespeare productions; and Shakespeare & Company, a professional theater group in western Massachusetts, through creative and comprehensive workshops, appeals to kids of all ages, learning styles, and abilities. All the approaches are different, yet in a sense all are the same: participating kids do not simply read the plays; they immerse themselves in the language, analyze the personalities and motives of the characters, improvise, invent, discuss, re-write, add music and movement, and develop an understanding of the world in which Shakespeare lived and wrote – the world beyond the plays, where dancing bears lumbered in the streets and traitors’ heads were displayed on spikes.

Approached in this fashion, the plays become astonishingly real. An exercise from Shakespeare & Company, for example, is called “It Takes a Classroom to Do a Monologue.” Onstage Hamlet and Claudius are talking, so – where’s Polonius? What is Ophelia doing? Horatio? Gertrude? A play, the directors point out, is a small slice of a much greater world; and involvement in the play is enhanced with increasing appreciation of everything that surrounds it.

So what was Ophelia doing? Drinking tea? Sobbing in her bedroom? Having read this, I’ll never view a play the same way again.

The book also includes many creative suggestions for Shakespeare teachers, facilitators, and directors, and an excellent and highly detailed act-by-act account of how to involve kids in a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Most approaches to teaching Shakespeare are painfully superficial: we’ve all seen kids plow unhappily through a Shakespearean text just because it’s on somebody’s required reading list. The kids in Performing Shakespeare, however, have not only forged an empowering dramatic community of their own, but have gained access to an enriching new world. If you want your kids to read Shakespeare, there are many available paperback editions of the plays. If you want your kids to love him, however, try Performing Shakespeare. A very different, highly interactive, and wholly inspirational approach to the Bard.

$16.95 from Mountainside Press; www.mountainsidepress.com; e-mail: mtnside@adelphia.net; (802) 447-7094.

CHOICE, American Library Assocation, Nov. '05

This useful and easily digested guide is packed with proven methods for bringing Shakespeare to life. Addressing those interested in teaching Shakespeare, in acting, or in finding a guide to involving children in after-school dramatics, this book will be not only be helpful but also inspiring. Highly Recommended.