You’ll have to bear with me this week…My daughter just turned 11, and so my focus is, of course, on her!  But in thinking about this blog and my daughter, it occurred to me that I had a few things to say about children and Shakespeare.

Scott wrote a recent post - http://www.enotes.com/blogs/shakespeare/2008-03/kinder-bard-en/ - which discussed an article about exposing children to Shakespeare at the age of 4.  I agree completely with this premise.  Why not get kids interested in these wonderful stories while they’re still young enough to love fairy tales?  Why can’t they understand The Tempest if they can understand “Rapunzel”?  And language experts say that the younger a child, the easier it is for them to learn a new language.  Now, far be it from me to say that Shakespeare is another language!!  But I know it presents difficulties to some people when they are first trying to handle the Elizabethan poetry, and so if it works better for little kids whose brains still have all those wonderful firing synapses, then why not go for it?

I started the Shakespeare Festival at our school because I figured out that getting Shakespeare “off the page and onto the stage” is critical to students’ enjoyment and understanding of these plays.  People scoff when I say that I added Hamlet to our 7th grade reading list.  Of course it’s a bit of a stretch, but it’s nothing they can’t handle, particularly when we get up and starting reading aloud and acting out the story.  Last semester I worked with a group of students who ranged in age from 5 to 15 on a scene from The Tempest.  This exercise that I did came from a great book called Teaching Shakespeare, by Rex Gibson.  In it he suggested using Ariel’s story of the shipwreck and dividing lines amongst all of the kids, except Prospero, who is a single actor/reader.  So I took one of my older girls and gave her Prospero’s lines, and then divided Ariel’s lines among the rest of the kids.  The lines were divided, too, so they were manageable for younger kids.  Our littlest boy had a line with four words, and then we just worked on up to more and longer lines for the oldest kids.  They had so much fun with this - We even added sound effects so that there were ocean/surf crashing noises in the background while Ariel is telling his story, as well as thunder bolts at “Jove’s lighting, the precursors O’th’ dreadful thunderclaps”!  This was a great experience that led several of the kids to ask me, “When can we do more of this?”  In addition, they really wanted to know the entire story of The Tempest, which gave me the opportunity to do more teaching and sharing of Shakespeare.

Another great way to get younger kids involved in the plays is by having them be extras.  Our Much Ado last summer included the masked ball scene in Act II, complete with a choreographed 16th century Italian court dance!  It was SO neat to see these actors (yes, even the teenage boys!) get into this and want to learn these dance steps to bring even more dimension and life to our production.  Altogether we had 20 dancers - five groups of four dancers each - and the majority of them were extras - younger kids without lines in the play but who really wanted to be involved in the production in some capacity.  My daughter was one of these, as well as the Noble Lady who sings at Hero’s tomb in Act V (yes, I just had to mention my cute kid again!)!

So what exactly is the point to this post, other than to talk about my adorable birthday girl?  I want to encourage all teachers out there - elementary and secondary, public and private schools, and homeschoolers - to not be afraid to tackle the Bard and bring him to life with whatever group of kids you get to teach.  It never ceases to amaze me how much kids can do when they’re encouraged and loved through the process!

Posted Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:31:42 and filed under Shakespeare Festivals, Language, Dance, Much Ado About Nothing, Schools, Actors, Staging Shakespeare, Comedy, Education, Movies, Music, Theatre, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Acting, Poetry. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.