Mary Ann Brosnan
“The Play’s the Thing!”
Implementing Activities and Humor When Studying Shakespeare
Introduction
As a high school student, I loved Shakespeare. I looked forward to reading his
plays for homework and discussing them in class. I performed in Shakespeare’s plays in
high school. I entered Shakespearian monologue competitions, and enjoyed memorizing
soliloquies for class assignments. In college, I became an English major and wrote my
senior thesis on Shakespeare’s daughters Beatrice and Portia. And when I came to State
High through the PDS Program, Macbeth was an easy and obvious choice for the play on
which I was to teach my unit.
The unit was set to be taught in January; I started planning in September. I
couldn’t wait to start. On a weekend trip back home to Philadelphia, I found the Macbeth
script I had used when studying the play my sophomore year in high school; it wasn’t
hard to find. I have a whole bookcase filled with texts I have studied in my bedroom at
home. The pages of this text were filled with my old notes neatly printed in the margins.
I brought the script back with me, as both a practical guide for teaching the play and an
inspirational reminder of how much I had loved studying it
I was in for a rude awakening. I guess I always realized the majority of students
do not enjoy Shakespeare the way I did, but, in my enthusiastic planning, I had failed to
significantly account for this. Spurred on by comments from students and their levels of
engagement during the unit, I set out to discover the roots of their resistance to studying
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Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Through conversations with my College Prep 12 students, as
well as written opinions from them, I was able to pull together three main objections to
reading Shakespeare. A first objection was that his language was too difficult to
understand, and it wasn’t worth the effort of “decoding.” A second was put quite simply
in one student’s phrase: “Shakespeare’s a downer.” A third common objection to reading
Shakespeare was that his plays were often set in contexts that the students couldn’t relate
to, such as medieval Scotland.
Based on these findings, I attempted throughout the unit to find ways to engage
students in the text despite their resistances. I found that generally, through the
implementation of activity-based lesson plans, the accommodation of humor in the
classroom, and the rewriting of Shakespeare’s Macbeth into new, easier to relate to
contexts, students could find entertainment and meaning in a text they professed to
dislike. Based on the success I had with these practices in my unit, I believe they might
hold value for teachers of any text that is written in a language that may be unfamiliar to
students, tragic, or over a century old.
Hating Shakespeare and His Language
It started with side comments. When I mentioned to some students that Macbeth
would be our next unit, I was immediately confronted with “I hate Shakespeare” and “He
doesn’t even speak English.” Dismayed, I went home that night and started to think
about why my students were so opposed to Shakespeare. I wondered if this sentiment
pertained to the whole class or just a noisy few.
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My question was answered once we started getting into the unit, and things began
to take a turn for the worse. They once again started up with the complaints, arguing that
this text was “too hard for them”, they did “not understand it,” and that they did “not
want to read it.” To me, these complaints seemed fairly generic, and I was unsure of
where to go from here. Exactly what made the text too hard? What didn’t they
understand? Why didn’t they want to read it?
My first guess, spurred on by the “He doesn’t even speak English” comments was
the language, but even then, I wasn’t sure of exactly what it was about the language that
they hated or even feared. I became torn. I wanted my students to engage with the
language of Shakespeare, not read some bland, translated version of his play, but I also
wanted them to understand the text. I decided to wait on giving them the parallel texts
they desired. I wanted to see if their feelings would change if they engaged with the
language first.
Here another problem was presented, how could I get these students engaged in
the language when they hate it? Then, on reading Setting Shakespeare Free I became
inspired. The CP 12 classes I taught were about 75% male and included about half of the
varsity football team. They loved football- why not have a literal line toss like the book
suggested (O’Brien, 1993)? This activity could prove beneficial because it would draw
on bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, instead of just the linguistic, and even intrapersonal
and interpersonal intelligences, found more typically in the English classroom. Howard
Gardner defines bodily-kinesthetic intelligence as “the use of all or part of the body to
solve problems or fashion products.” (Gardner, Kornhaber, and Wake, 1996). In this
activity, students would make use of this intelligence by throwing and catching the ball.
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It was my desire to give students, like my football players, a chance to use their
intelligences in the English classroom, and, by pairing the speaking of the lines with the
familiar, almost mundane activity of throwing a ball, to downplay the formality of the
language. I hoped that through this activity, I could start to lessen my students’
resistance to studying this play.
I handed out lines from the first act to my classes before we had even started the
play. The lines had no character names on them. The students were each given one of
nine lines; they had about a minute to look over it. Then I threw them a ball and told
them to say their line and then throw the ball to someone else, who then had to say her or
her line. Below are the lines that were included.
Fair is foul and foul is fair…(1.1.12)
So foul and fair a day I have not seen. (1.3.39)
If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me
Without my stir. (1.3.157-159)
There’s no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face. (1.4.12-13)
Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires. (1.4.57-58)
Yet I do fear thy nature;
It is too full of the milk of human kindness…(1.5.16-17)
Screw your courage to the sticking place,
and we’ll not fail…(1.7.70-71)
Look like th’ innocent flower,
But be the serpent under ‘t. (1.5.76-78)
If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well
It were done quickly. (1.7.1-2)
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This lesson was successful with them in a few ways. Most importantly, it made
the students actually speak the lines and get their tongues around the language. It also
got the students used to hearing the lines. Since there were only nine lines and most
people went more than once, lines were repeated over and over during the 5-10 minute
period spent on this activity. I noticed that the students seemed to become more animated
as the activity went on. As the lines were repeated, students started saying them with
more confidence and ease. They stopped stumbling through the lines, and looked up
from the slip of paper as they read them. Some students even started using different
inflections with the lines, and delivering them to their friends. In general, students began
to look engaged with the material.
Based on these reactions, it would seem as though the students’ resentment and
unease with Shakespeare’s language was initially based on the idea that it was difficult to
speak. The students had been apprehensive about reading Shakespeare aloud. No one
wants to be forced to stumble through words they find difficult to pronounce and even
more difficult to understand in front of an audience of his or her peers. Once the focus
was taken off of the delivery, the students seemed to have an easier time with it. They
were only asked to read one line; they were given a few minutes to practice it; and, they
were asked to recite it as part of a game centered on throwing a ball to each other. The
majority of students seemed more focused on the person to whom they were going to
throw the ball than the actual delivery of their line. The line’s prestige and the pressure
of performing it were played down during this exercise, and these actions seemed to
result in more student confidence and engagement while speaking the line.
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The second part of this activity moved on to address student interpretations of the
lines. I assumed there would be a difference between having students speak the lines with
ease and having the students understand the lines well enough to provide written
interpretations of them. Vygotsky argued that “written speech is a separate linguistic
function, differing from oral speech in both structure and mode of functioning. Even its
minimal development requires a high level of abstraction” (Vygotsky, 1986), and the idea
that writing (as opposed to speaking) can lead a unique understanding of material is
asserted by Janet Emig.
What is striking about writing as a process is that, by its very nature, all three
ways of dealing with actuality are simultaneously deployed. That is, the symbolic
transformation of experience through the specific symbol system of verbal
language is shaped into an icon (the graphic product) by the enactive hand. If the
most efficacious learning occurs when learning is re-inforced, then writing
through its inherent re-inforcing cycle involving hand, eye, and brain marks a
uniquely powerful multi-representational mode for learning. (Emig, 1977)
It was my intent to have students use the writing process to generate an interpretation of
their lines, in the hope that they would not merely practice the speaking aspect of this
activity. Students formed groups determined by which line they had tossed. They then
were asked to respond to the following questions: “What kind of person would say
this?”, “Why would they say this?”, and “What would they mean by saying it?”
Answers, once written, were to be shared with the class. Included below is one group’s
response.
For the quote “There’s no art/ to find the mind’s construction in the face” (1.4.1213), one group suggested that it might be a parental figure saying the line because it
sounded like “You can’t always judge a book by its cover,” a phrase at least one of the
parents in that group of students used to say. The student reporting for this group seemed
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relatively eager to share this with us, especially when mentioning his mother’s old
phrase. He got a bit of a laugh from the other students in the classroom as well. During
this sharing, this student exhibited the most engagement, or excitement to share, while
telling the class about his mother’s old saying, and the class reinforced his excitement by
laughing with him about it. It seemed to me that a positive reaction from the class while
sharing, such as an audible appreciation of the sharer’s humor, could be a motivator to
increase engagement.
Colleen Ruggieri also analyzes her experiences with the positive reinforcement of
laughter in the classroom, claiming that during an exercise where students were asked to
share puns, a student who she had labeled as shy was rewarded by laughter. “As the
students laughed, I saw a sense of accomplishment in this boy’s face before he went back
to his seat. While the time he spent in front of the class was brief, the experience was
made less threatening by the use of humor” (Ruggieri 1999). In her experience, the
laughter not only served to encourage the student, but it also downplayed the formality of
the text with which they were working, similar to the results found during the line toss
activity.
But in order to have this excitement to share, the student must feel at least
somewhat confident in what he is about to say. For most students in my classes, it seems
like the possibility of getting positive reinforcement, such as praise from the teacher, or a
laugh from their peers, is not enough to make them want to speak or share their ideas.
They must also have a basic understanding of the idea they wish to talk about. The group
that shared on this line seemed to have this basic understanding in addition to a comedic
line. It was shown through the relation the group made between the Macbeth quote and a
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common phrase they had all heard before. They appeared to make sense of the quote
through knowledge of a previous quote. They also used that knowledge as a base for
understanding the motivation behind saying the quote and what type of figure would say
it.
Paul Skrebels makes a case for a similar “transhistorization” of Shakespeare when
teaching Much Ado About Nothing to his students. This process involves the comparing
of historic and textual contexts with contemporary contexts that share similar issues, such
as the scandals surrounding Hero’s chastity and the scandals of Charles and Diana within
the British family. He claims
The place of gossip, slander, and scandal in any construction of fame or celebrity
is an important aspect of research into the lives of “the rich and famous,” and
provides a convenient and, in terms or the popular culture in which our students
are steeped, relevant point of entry for comparing the contexts and concerns of
Shakespeare’s era with our own” (Skrebels, 1997).
This method of engaging students with Shakespeare also uses the prior knowledge and
experiences of students to help them better understand a Shakespearian text.
Another reason why students might have been willing to engage in this activity is
because the lines were not associated with a text or a certain character within the text yet.
Because they were isolated from the text, the students may have felt that there was more
freedom in interpreting them. They did not have to worry about whether their
interpretation coincided with the plot as they knew it up to that point or was appropriate
for a certain character to be thinking. They were free to rely on their own assumptions
and values and interpret the quote in a manner that was meaningful to them, not one that
fit into a typical interpretation of the text.
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Matching the “difficult to understand” language of Shakespeare with a familiar
and enjoyable activity in the first part of this lesson definitely seemed to help my students
move past their initial resistance to Shakespeare’s language. Once they were warmed up
to the quotes, so to speak, they seemed to be comfortable enough to start interpreting
them. Some of the students were even eager to share their interpretations, as in the case
mentioned above. Their eagerness to share seemed to result from a desire to get a laugh
from their fellow students as well a comfort with the language that was shown through
their ability to relate the quote to something in their own lives. I suspect that interpreting
the quote when it was isolated from the text also helped dismiss the idea that there was a
“correct” interpretation.
Of course, not all of the students participated enthusiastically in this activity, and
not all of the students were eager to offer reflective interpretations of the quotes. In
preparing this lesson, I had not considered the idea that some of the students might get
more anxiety from having to throw a ball than from reading a line aloud to the class, or
that a student who was very active during the line toss might not participate in small
group discussions, and come away from the activity without having interpreted his quote.
But, what I learned specifically from this lesson was that the formality and presumed
inaccessibility of an older version of the English language could be downplayed and
made more accessible to most students when paired with a familiar activity and isolated
from the text.
“Shakespeare’s a downer”
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A second objection students had to reading Shakespeare was brought to my
attention by Chris, one of my fourth period students, at the end of class one day. He had
mentioned that he had never enjoyed reading plays by Shakespeare, but that he was
finding some of the skits we performed in class entertaining and fun. I probed him a little
further to see what exactly he hadn’t enjoyed about the plays he had read, including
Macbeth. Chris responded quite simply by saying all the Shakespeare he has read in
school, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth, “were all downers.” When I
asked the class about this objection, many others agreed. Only a few of the students had
read any of Shakespeare’s comedies or more lighthearted pieces.
These discoveries made me wonder if perhaps the students were resistant towards
reading Shakespeare partially because they did not enjoy reading tragedy. The very first
day of class, students were asked to share their favorite movie as an icebreaker activity.
Nearly half of my students responded that Superbad, the new comedy about two
awkward high school friends trying against all odds to have sex with the girls they liked
and supply alcohol to a friend’s party, was by far the greatest movie they had ever seen.
The other half of the students responded with titles of other comedies or romantic
comedies. Remembering these answers and acknowledging Chris’ insight, I started to
investigate why some of the skits we performed were so enjoyed by the students.
Performing scenes from Macbeth and other short skits in front of the class were
ranked as some of the most enjoyable and helpful activities we engaged in over the
course of this unit in the students’ Unit Evaluations. It would seem as though the use of
humor and the desire to get a laugh from classmates, as well as the enjoyment the classes
had watching the skits, made them the most popular activities. I have learned that
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laughter can be a powerful tool in the classroom. Peter Doskoch has asserted that “In
addition to it’s biological effects, laughter may also improve our mood through social
means” (Doskoch, 1996). He explains further that telling jokes, especially ones that refer
to shared experiences or problems, can increase our sense of belonging (Doskoch, 1997).
In light of his research, it seems justifiable that the skits and performances that relied on
humor and shared experiences of my students were the most popular and helpful, for they
worked both to illuminate the text and encourage social bonding between students in the
classroom. I have included examples of two in-class performances below, one on a
situational improv scene, and the other on a scene from Macbeth.
Before reading the script, the students engaged in a lesson where they were asked
to write an improv scene based on one of the following situations.
Situation One: While walking home together, two close friends are told by a reliable
source that each will get the thing he or she covet more than anything else: a date with
that special someone; the one and only car of its kind; the last ticket to a best seat for the
greatest performance of a band or team; etc. Big problem: there are two friends, but only
one date or car or ticket, and each of the friends wants it.
Situation Two: An ambitious man sees an illegal way to become head of his company or
country, but his cautiousness and loyalty make him indecisive about pursuing his goal.
His motto: “Maybe tomorrow.” He shares his ambition with his equally ambitious wife,
who is refined and elegant on the outside, but a “killer” within. Her motto is “Just do it.”
Situation Three: Several longtime friends get together for a meal. After the ice cream
they take a siesta only to be awakened by the cries of one of the guests, who discovers
that his money is missing.
All three of these situations related thematically to events in the play. It was my hope
that this activity would allow the students to start investigating some ideas and issues in
the play, and show them that these issues are still seen today. I’ve included an account of
one of the skits below. It was based off of situation one.
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Two students, John and Rich, entered the room talking about how much they
wanted to see a new movie they had four tickets to. They met up with two friends
in the middle of the room who also wanted to see the movie. When John told the
two other friends that they had four tickets to the new movie, the two friends were
very excited. Then Rich reluctantly explained that they were taking two girls,
Miss Brosnan and Ms. Iacobazzo, to the movie instead of the two friends. The
two friends were outraged and proceeded to hassle John and Rich verbally while
giving them slight shoves. It ended with the two friends leaving in a huff and
John and Rich nonchalantly saying “Lets go pick up Brosnan and Iacobazzo.”
This particular skit was exceedingly popular with the students watching it. The part the
audience seemed to enjoy the most was the reference to Ms. Iacobazzo, my mentor
teacher, and me. Most of the students laughed at this part, some even yelled comments
out to the actors like “No way!” or “Aw, man.” There were even a few “oooooo’s”
reminiscent of a sitcom audience response. The comments and laughter from the
audience seemed to encourage the actors and make them want to keep going in a more
dedicated manner. The actors became more in character. John and Rick took on the
persona of jock-ish studs who are used to getting girls all the time. Their two friends
started to get more enraged after the audience comments, and that is when they started
pushing the other two actors.
After analyzing the change in the students’ performances, it would seem as
though the positive reinforcement from their classmates was at least one of the factors
that caused the students’ rising commitment to getting and staying in character. The
students in the skit enjoyed entertaining the rest of the class, and their skit was
entertaining because of its use of humor. In this way, humor was used in the classroom
to engage students in a text that they formerly described as “a downer.”
The skit these students wrote also addressed some of the main issues characters in
Macbeth struggle with. The two students who had the tickets and the dates did not want
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to give them up, even at the cost of risking the friendships they had with the two other
students. A parallel was drawn between the student’s actions and the actions of
Macbeth. Once he became king of Scotland, he did everything in his power to keep that
title. He denigrated the reputations of would-be claimants to the throne, jeopardized his
sanity, and murdered several people, including his former friend Banquo. The students in
this skit had explored issues they would come across in the play, and performed their own
interpretations and reactions to these issues. Even though they may not have realized it,
they had already investigated problems and motives characters in the play experienced,
but in a humorous and entertaining way.
If I do this activity over again, I think I will add a Macbeth predictions exercise
after the improv scenes. While the students engaged in the skits and thematically
explored many interesting issues we were going to see in the play, I’m not sure if an
explicit connection was made between the conflicts brought up in the activity and the
conflicts that were going to be present in the text. Having the students predict what some
of the conflicts might be in the play could have helped them to make this connection and
relate the skits to the text without giving away what was going to happen. I think this
activity could have served as a helpful step towards the text.
During the second week of the unit, a group of students in each class was asked to
perform part of Act 1, Scene 3. It is the scene in Macbeth where Macbeth and Banquo
meet the three witches. During two of the three in-class performances, the students
playing the witches began to grow animated and act out, which was quite appropriate for
their characters. The line “You should be women,/ But your beards forbid me to
interpret/ That you are so.” (1.3.47-49) got a laugh from each of the three classes that
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went over the lesson. In two of the classes, however, the students playing the witches
seemed to get inspired by that laughter and make their characters look even sillier.
In my fourth period class, the audience laughed loudly at the end of Banquo’s
line. The students playing the witches heard that laughter, and then, a few moments after
the line was spoken, reacted to the line, making offended, unintelligible screeches back to
the student playing Banquo. These noises, in turn, lead to more laughter from the
audience. Throughout the rest of the scene, the students playing the witches looked for
other points to bring their screeches into the scene. They appeared to want to play the
witches and wanted to make them funny and weird. Adding humor to the scene seemed to
make these students bring the characters of the play to life. They engaged both the
audience of the classmates as well as themselves by inserting comedic elements into the
script.
Ruggieri had similar experiences when teaching Julius Caesar to her students and
asking them to engage in the comedy in the play. She focused on the puns in the first
scene, and then asked her students to create their own. Talking about her students’
reactions to the activity, she remembers “Many of them added exaggerated gestures and
facial expressions in an attempt to communicate their interpretation of the puns as well s
the text. The use of humor made an obvious difference in the atmosphere” (Ruggieri
1999). Many tragedies required in school curriculums have comedic relief woven into
them. Based on my experiences, I believe that playing up these humorous moments is an
effective way to engage students in a text, even if it is “a downer.”
It may be problematic to have students so focused on the comic relief when
reading a tragedy. I struggle wondering whether it is more important to engage the
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students in the text, regardless of what aspect engages them, or if it is more important to
hit on the “major” ideas of the text and have the students focus on exploring them in
depth, rather than the comedy in the play. The improv activity seemed to hit on both the
comedy of the situation and some of the conflict, which was good, but I’m not sure if I
can say the same for the Act 1 Scene 3 performance. The products of laughter and tears
can both represent an investment in a text, and Shakespeare most likely used humor
deliberately in his tragedies to both provide comic relief and to reach audience members
on different levels of the emotional spectrum. It is possible that students could
experience the tragedy of a play more fully by experiencing it alongside the comedy.
But, I am still questioning ways to integrate both of these aspects completely and
effectively.
You Can’t Teach an Old Bard New Tricks
A third common objection to reading Shakespeare in class was that his works
were dated; students claimed they were “hard to relate to” and didn’t hold much value for
the modern high school English student. One student, Matt, explained “I don’t feel a
connection for Macbeth’s desire to be king because the position is so old, like nonexistent
anymore- I mean, who has kings nowadays?” I decided that even if the students could
not relate to the desire to be king, I would try to have them connect to more general
desires and ideas, such as Macbeth’s idea of “vaulting ambition,” regardless of the
specific context in which he mentioned it.
Because we had had success in creating pre-reading skits around the issues of
Macbeth, I wanted the student’s final project to revolve around the same idea. The goal
for the project became to rewrite a major scene from the play into a new context that
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would help the class better understand the scene. The new context would hopefully allow
students to relate to tensions and issues of the play through settings and scenarios more
familiar to them than those in the play. Also, the creative and performative aspects of the
project seemed uniquely suited for its purposes. Carmen Cordova states “the arts will
enable us to explore the deep parts of our lives that only poetry, drama, song, dance, or
painting can reach. Our students are willing and able to use the arts to make meaning out
of our complex world” (Cordova, 2006). Drama seemed to be an ideal mode in which to
create this project in because it would help students communicate their ideas about the
scene to an audience in a complex, dynamic way.
Additionally, students were asked to hold a panel discussion at the end of their
scene to field questions about the directorial choices they made. English professor James
Hirsh asserts that “a teacher who wants students to think for themselves…cannot insist on
doing all of their thinking for them” (Hirsh, 1990). It was my hope that through this
project, students would think for themselves through synthesizing their understandings of
the scene and creating a new product that coincided with and explored their
understandings. Students would provide during these panel discussions their analysis of
the scene, and they way they presented that analysis through directorial choice.
The Scene Projects were written up in the Unit Evaluations as by far the most
enjoyable and helpful activity we engaged in during the unit. Students set the scenes in
several new contexts including a House episode, the Wild West, Star Wars, a high school
cafeteria. Below is the script of a rewritten version of Act 1 Scene 3 in which Macbeth
and Banquo meet the witches and are told their first prophesies. It was set in the hall of a
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high school. Macbeth and Banquo are members of a football team for which Duncan is
captain.
Macbeth Scene Project
Macbeth: What a strange day.
Banquo: Who are you? Why are you so dressed up? Helllooo? You look
familiar, but I can’t say for sure if I have seen either of you before.
Macbeth: Yeah, who are you?
First Prom Committee Person: Macbeth! Class President!
Second Prom Committee Person: Macbeth! Class Representative!
Both: Macbeth! Soon to be Prom King too~
Banquo: You must be mistaken, the election hasn’t even happened yet. What
about me? Do you know who I am?
Both: Banquo!
First Prom Committee Person: Not as popular as Macbeth, but more popular.
Second Prom Committee Person: Not as talented as Macbeth, but more talented.
Both: You will not be king, but you will be even better known. So have a party!
Congratulations to Macbeth and Banquo!
Macbeth: How can you know all of this about us? And before it even happens,
and yet we have no idea who you two are? Who are you? Tell us!
Prom Committee members run down the halls
Banquo: Where do you think they went off to?
Macbeth: They left I guess. They were cute though, I could’ve put up with them a
little longer.
Banquo: What are you smoking? Those were guys. Well, anyway, they said you
were going to be prom king. Congrats.
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Macbeth: Yeah, but they said you would be more popular than me.
Ross: Hey, I heard you guys got into the playoff. That’s awesome!
Angus: Yeah, coach just told us.
Banquo: That’s surprising; I thought we were a long shot to get in.
Angus: Yeah I know! Well, with you guys making the playoffs, Macbeth is a
shoe-in to win prom king.
Macbeth: (to himself) Dude, I know I played well in the last game, but I’m not
even captain of the team, Duncan is. He’s the one everybody looks up to. (to
Banquo) Banquo, playoffs! Sweet!
Banquo: If you trust what these guys are saying, then you should be very happy.
This is weird though, even we didn’t know that we made the playoffs. It just
seems a little fishy to me,
Coach: Hey Mac! Good job, you had a lot to do with us getting into the playoffs.
I love you!
Macbeth: Thanks coach. (to himself) Wow, so those guys were right, we did
make the playoffs. If they were right about that…This is all happening so fast.
I’ve never thought of becoming prom king. I always figured it would be the
captain of the team that would win it. That means Duncan won’t win it though.
Banquo: Look at yourself! When have you ever stressed over something so
much?
Macbeth: (to himself) Surely something would have to happen for Duncan to not
become king. Maybe not. Maybe I will just win enough votes, I did play pretty
well, yeah, yeah, I did.
Banquo: He’s getting a little bit caught up in the moment, he’s not used to being
popular.
Ross and Angus nod their heads.
Macbeth: Well those girls, er, guys, whatever, they said it would happen. They’re
probably right.
Banquo: Okay Macbeth, can we go now? (to Ross and Angus) Hey, we’ll see you
guys around.
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Macbeth: Sorry, sorry, I got a little distracted. Thanks you two, for telling ys the
good news. I won’t forget it. (to Banquo, half surprised) Dude, this has been one
hell of a day.
Banquo: No kidding.
The student audience watching this scene was asked to evaluate how it measured up to
the requirement of the project to help the class better understand the text on a scale of 1-4
with 4 being the highest, most successful a performance could be. The evaluation results
for this scene included a few ratings of “3- Performance enhanced my understanding of
the scene, I was informed” and an overwhelming amount of ratings for “4-Performance
was fluid, well practiced, and portrayed the group’s analysis of the scene, I was
engaged.” Overall, this performance was one of the most engaging and popular of all
performances in this class.
There are a few reasons why this scene would have been the top-ranked scene of
the class. First, it played up the comedy of the witches’ ambiguous gender, which had
delighted the class earlier in the unit. Instead of having just one line about the witches’
gender situated within a series of confusing observations about the witches, these
students isolated the remark. As the members of the prom committee left, Macbeth
remarked on how attractive they were and was immediately confronted by Banquo’s
remark “What are you smoking, they were guys!” The change made the remark more
prominent, and added to the already amusing situation by having Macbeth express a
romantic interest in them. Additionally, when the football players tell Macbeth and
Banquo they’re going to the playoffs, Macbeth accounts for his confused amazement by
stating “those girls, er, guys, they said it would happen,” once again playing up the
humor involved with the witches ambiguous genders.
Brosnan 20
Another reason students might have found these lines engaging is that they
pushed some of the boundaries for what is commonly held to be appropriate in English
classrooms. Romantic or sexual attraction to peers whose genders are not entirely clear is
not a topic often mentioned. Additionally, the line “What are you smoking?” which
brings up the use of mind altering drugs, is also not a topic commonly discussed in class.
These moments in the scene may have gotten the biggest laughs because they were both
humorous and somewhat daring. And, while this scene was not the raciest one
performed, the actors’ inclusion of lines that were borderline inappropriate may have
been part of the reason why the audience was so attentive.
It is also probable that this scene was the most popular because it was imbedded
in a context whose social norms, ideals, and values were immediately understood by the
rest of the class. Everyone in the classroom was familiar with the context of the halls of a
high school, myself included. While many students couldn’t relate to a society governed
by warrior kings, they could relate to the power a class president, a class representative,
and finally a prom king has over his peers. The actors involved with this scene explained
in their panel discussion following the performance that they chose to make Macbeth’s
final achievement prom king “because in high school, everyone wants to be popular.” In
making these changes, they acknowledged what they understood to be a universal desire
among themselves and their peers, and made that the mark for which their Macbeth was
aiming. They changed his greatest desire to something their classmates could
understand: the desire to be popular. In doing so, the class also acquired a better
understanding of some of the characters’ motivations in the play, such as Macbeth’s
motivations to risk everything to secure his place as king. It would that in this situation,
Brosnan 21
drama worked “as a common place location where the students analyzed their characters
and their social realities, grounded in their personal experiences and emotions” (Medina,
2006). The resetting of the script into a new, dramatic context allowed the students to
access the text on a more personal and complex level.
Also during the panel discussion, the actors talked about their decision to
incorporate sports into the scene. They explained that in the original script, “The whole
connection between Macbeth, Banquo and Duncan was that they were warriors…so we
had to connect (our characters) in some way, and we decided to do it through a sports
team connection.” Again, these students appeared to be bringing their own
understandings of what bonds people together and incorporating those understanding into
their rewriting of the script. They knew from reading the text that Macbeth, Banquo and
Duncan were “connected” in some way, and they assumed it was from being in battle
together. These students took that knowledge and imbedded in into a new context that
was more familiar to them and their classmates.
Interestingly, not all of the most engaging skits were performed in contexts as
familiar to the students as a high school hallway. The Wild, Wild West context a group
chose to heighten the final show down aspect of MacDuff and Macbeth’s final fight was
voted equally as engaging as the scene set in the high school hallway. Also, the new
futuristic Star Wars context for Act 5 Scene 1 where Lady Macbeth washes her hands
was another favorite. In this scene, the characters of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader
were used to portray the two conflicting sides of Lady Macbeth in the scene as her lines
oscillate from recalling Duncan’s murder with calculating coolness and desperately trying
to rid herself of the guilt which is driving her mad. Then, playing off of Lady Macbeth’s
Brosnan 22
obsession with her unclean hands, they used Darth Vader’s legendary light saber slash
that cuts off Luke’s hand as a triumph of Lady Macbeth’s dark side over her good side
and a dramatic representation of her suicide.
While these other new contexts were not ones my students had directly
participated in, they were contexts that most of them had become familiar with over the
course of their lives, and perhaps that is why they found them so easy to relate to and
understand. Based on the student feedback on the scene projects, it would seem that the
setting of scenes from an “outdated” text into more familiar contexts is a valuable way
for students to explore character motivations and issues within that text. Though my
students were able to recognize issues and motivations in characters, such as the conflict
between Macbeth’s desire to be king and his close bond to Duncan, they were unable to
relate to them until parallels were drawn between the situations in which the characters
find themselves in and situations in which my students find themselves or at least are
more familiar with.
Conclusions
There seems to be something very appealing to students about changing
Shakespeare, especially in ways that are somewhat risqué or bordering on inappropriate.
Speaking Shakespeare’s lines while playing catch, writing skits that thematically relate to
content in the play but also center around students dating teachers, and taking ownership
of his scenes by rewriting them into new contexts are all ways students engaged
successfully with the text. I have questioned whether these techniques are appropriate to
employ when teaching one of the greatest works in English Literature. Must Shakespeare
Brosnan 23
be changed to make students interested? Am I reducing his work to something that only
retains its bawdiness and neglects its intellectual appeal?
Being a straightedge student myself, I have struggled with these questions. It has
occurred to me, however, that perhaps the students are not engaged with these activities
because of their risqué or humorous content. It may be that what engages these students
is also the act of creating something new from something old. It is not the actual
changing of Shakespeare that appeals to them, but the recreation of his work into more
meaningful contexts for them. To engage so directly with a text that you actually create
new meaning from it is an enriching and productive learning experience, and this seemed
to happen in the students’ line toss interpretations, their improv scenes, and their final
scene projects.
Based on my experiences with the three College Preparatory 12 classes I taught
this year, I think I am closer to articulating what those students disliked or feared about
studying Shakespeare in class.: namely that the language is too difficult to understand,
the plots they read are usually depressing, and the plays are outdated. However, through
my work with these classes, we were able to combat these resistances by downplaying
the formality of the language with activities, lightening the tragedy by emphasizing
comic moments and rewriting scenes into context with which students were more
familiar.
As I have been mentioning throughout this inquiry paper, I believe that the
implementation of activities, the inclusion of humor, and the drawing of parallels
between the values and ideas of an “outdated” text and modern contexts are all methods
that could be used when teaching disengaged students any play that may seem difficult to
Brosnan 24
grasp. It is my intention to try and include these methods with any drama I teach to
students who are disengaged in the future, and to try to continue to share my appreciation
of drama with my students.
Brosnan 25
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