Creative Shakespeare

The Globe Education Guide to Practical Shakespeare

Fiona Banks

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781408156841
• eBook ISBN: 9781408156834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

This unique book desribes the ways in which educational practitioners at Shakespeare's Globe theatre bring Shakespeare to life for students of all ages.The Globe approach is always active and inclusive - each student finds their own way into Shakespeare - focussing on speaking, moving and performing rather than reading. Drawing on her rich and varied experience as a teacher, Fiona Banks offers a range of examples and practical ideas teachers can take and adapt for their own lessons. The result is a stimulating and inspiring book for teachers of drama and English keen to enliven and enrich their students' experience of Shakespeare.

Chapter one

Key principles and ideas for Creative Shakespeare

Keep it personal

There is no right way to teach Shakespeare. Just as there is no right interpretation of the plays or ‘correct’ reading of a character or scene. This is one of the reasons that Shakespeare can be so exciting, the potential for discoveries so potent, the possibilities for learning so great. It is also, of course, one of the reasons that it can be challenging. I’m often asked, what is Globe Education’s standard workshop for 14–16 year-olds (or indeed any particular age group)? The answer is always that we don’t have one; each one is particular to the group leader and the group in question. This is because if we did have a standard workshop I don’t think it would be very good. The key to teaching Shakespeare well is the recognition that there is no formula or approach that will bring unfailing ‘success’, but that every session relies on the interaction between teacher, students and play. This is true of the teaching of any subject, but just as painting a ‘fiddly’ area requires a greater application of skill and focus as a painter, so teaching a subject so potentially challenging and demanding as Shakespeare requires all our skill and expertise as teachers. When a session goes well it feels like the easiest thing in the world to teach. We are helped by great material, amazing stories and words that enliven our imaginations and emotions. But we also know that these words and the stories they tell can feel alien and mountainous to students. We need always to find ways to interpret and access the plays that are best for each particular group, and to create a journey into the world of the play that is structured to facilitate maximum learning, challenge and discovery.

I’ve said that each session relies on the interaction between teacher, students and play. It is no accident that ‘teacher’ is first on this list. I’ve noticed, though, that teachers rarely think about themselves, and if they do it’s certainly not first. We all have different feelings and attitudes towards teaching Shakespeare. These vary from play to play. Some plays we like and feel comfortable with, while the thought of teaching others is perhaps not so welcome! It’s important to recognize these feelings when thinking of approaches to the play and planning sessions.

Everyone has different strengths and interests. In our Globe Education Practitioner team we employ people with a wide range of skills, from backgrounds as actors and directors to clowns and writers. We always try to pick the person with the most appropriate skills and attributes for the group. It’s also an issue of personality. Who we are and our own personal life experiences affect the way we connect with and approach teaching any particular play. Teachers daily face the challenge of finding a wide range of skills within themselves. There is not the luxury of a large team within each classroom. Nevertheless, it is important to consider your strengths and weakness, likes, dislikes and style preferences. Not all the approaches in this book will be right for you, while others will need changing and developing to suit your personal style and approach. When we train our Globe Education Practitioners, one of the greatest challenges we face is trying to help them develop the confidence to be themselves and teach to their strengths, rather than use an activity they find difficult and don’t connect with simply because they saw it work well for another practitioner. Throughout the activities in this book there are comments and Tips from Globe Education’s team of consultants. They all use the activities differently to fit with their preferred teaching style and as they do so, the activities themselves evolve and develop. Their comments are intended to offer different windows onto an activity and to highlight the importance Globe Education places on individuality of approach – the value that each teacher as an individual brings to their teaching of Shakespeare.

No student is a ‘blank canvas’

Every group of students is different, with varying interests and needs. What works for one group may not work for another. Knowledge of the group and its needs is central to session planning. Some of the active approaches in this book work well with groups with little prior experience of active approaches to Shakespeare, while others are more complex and will probably work best with a group which is used to working together in this manner.

It’s rare to encounter a child post-11, but to a large extent, of almost any age, without some prior exposure to Shakespeare. Usually students have strong existing ideas, perceptions and experiences, both positive and negative. If a child has watched The Lion King they are familiar with the basic story of Hamlet. Strong Primary school engagement with Shakespeare means that students arrive at Secondary school with a developed knowledge and already have made a personal response to the plays. The (then DFES) publication Shakespeare for all ages and stages provided a framework for teaching Shakespeare from Early Years Foundation stage to Post-16 and captured and promoted excellent practice across all levels of education. It reminds us that as secondary level educators we are building on existing knowledge rather than starting with a ‘blank canvas’.

Dr Anton Franks, Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Nottingham often encourages his trainee teachers to approach any engagement with Shakespeare’s plays (with a new group) by asking the question ‘What does Shakespeare mean to you?’. This approach, with its intrinsic reminder that all learning and teaching of Shakespeare is to some extent contingent on prior experience or perception, is one Globe Education returns to in its work again and again. It doesn’t matter whether the answer to this question is positive, negative or indifferent. The knowledge it gives us about our students can be invaluable.

Creative Shakespeare, active learning

Shakespeare was an actor and playwright who wrote plays to be played, on a stage and to be seen and heard by an audience. He wrote many of them for playhouses, such as the Globe, that were large social spaces. Reading his plays without any form of active engagement, without his words in our mouths and emotions and actions in our bodies, is like trying to engage with a piece of music by looking at the notes on the page but not listening to the music itself, or like reading a television script without watching the programme that was made.

There is nothing new about the idea that Shakespeare wrote plays to be performed and that his work is best taught actively. Shakespeare’s plays were not printed in any format we would recognize during his lifetime. The first folio was printed in 1623, so his audiences would not have enjoyed the access to the plays as texts that we know today. Early publishers of early modern drama were all too aware of the potential pitfalls of doing so. In the preface to his play The Malcontent John Marston apologizes ‘that Scenes invented, merely to be spoken, should be enforcively published to be read’ and asks that the play ‘be pardoned, for the pleasure it once afforded you, when it was presented with the soul of lively action’. It was rare to read a play, commonplace to see it. An English Association pamphlet of 1908 on The Teaching of Shakespeare in Schools warns that ‘There is a serious danger in the classroom with text books open before us of our forgetting what drama really means’. The pamphlet goes on to recommend acting out of scenes and seeing the play in performance as good practice.

Shakespeare did not give his own actors a text, a complete written play, and expect them to learn or understand it. He provided them with parts containing their lines and cue only. They explored the play by playing: by acting it for an audience, by speaking the words, by experiencing their characters’ emotions, actions, reactions and their relationships with those around them. Simply reading a Shakespeare play is like watching a 3D film without the glasses. We get the story, we read the words, but we miss the richness and depth of the art form. We cannot engage with the film in the way that its creators intended. In his book Teaching Shakespeare Rex Gibson wrote simply:

Shakespeare was essentially a man of the theatre who intended his words to be spoken and acted out on stage. It is in that context of dramatic realisation that the plays are most appropriately understood and experienced. The consequence for teaching is clear: treat the plays as plays, for imaginative enactment in all kinds of different ways.

Active methods comprise a wide range of expressive, creative and physical activities. They recognise that Shakespeare wrote his plays for performance and that his scripts are completed by enactment of some kind.1

Approaches from the Globe

Many of the approaches in this book started life in the rehearsal room at the Globe. They are based on the way an actor engages with a play as a script. They have, in some cases, evolved and been adapted to work for young people, although in other cases they have not changed at all and are used with students just as a director would with an actor. When actors talk about the rehearsal process they often talk about ‘putting a play on its feet’ – in other words, exploring the text actively, discovering aspects of the play by ‘playing’. Playing their character but also being playful and experimental in their approach. Being inspired by the language of the plays, trying different ideas until they find the right one for their particular interpretation. Rehearsals are not about right answers but asking questions and exploring possibility. Actors are text detectives, looking for clues in the language – the words of the play. As actors become experienced in playing Shakespeare they develop a range of different ways into text. They select a particular technique or a combination of approaches to help them best play a character or moment. It’s these that we share in this book.

What is Creative Shakespeare?

A creative approach to Shakespeare can take many forms. It can mean physical activity; students discovering and exploring language through action – the type of exercise that can require an empty space where students can move freely. Equally it can be an exercise that can be performed at a desk with no particular space or circumstances required. Creative approaches can involve students in large and small group work, but can also require them to work on their own and in pairs. This diversity of approach mirrors a day in the rehearsal room.

Creative approaches are active, physically and/or intellectually. They require students to engage fully with the moment they are exploring, to analyse based on the evidence of their actual experience and to make informed critical responses to the play. They can enable and deepen a student’s insight and his/her analysis of any given moment or character. They challenge any notion that academic understanding and physical, vocal and emotional engagement with a text do not go hand in hand. Creative approaches invariably draw on, and value, imaginative engagement and response. They ask students to suspend judgement, to ask ‘what if?’. Creative approaches often require students, like actors, to turn detective and to try different approaches to exploring and analysing any given scene, character or situation.

Key benefits

Creative approaches to Shakespeare not only ensure students meet Shakespeare’s plays in the form in which they were created, as plays, but have been shown to deliver key benefits for learning and teaching. They offer us an opportunity to engage students with a range of different learning styles and can be adapted for all abilities. Often students who find Shakespeare daunting or difficult benefit most from these methods. In recent Globe Education research, boys made the most significant development after using a range of the creative approaches in this book – some climbing two attainment levels more than predicted during one Shakespeare unit.

This work is experiential. Students feel the emotions of a character and argue for their point of view. They are required to connect the physical and intellectual parts of themselves. This is the most natural state of learning. It’s how we learn as babies, trying everything physically – exploring what works. The creation of a physical and emotional memory of the play empowers students and can allow them to reach deeper and lasting levels of understanding. This idea is not new; it can be found as early as 551 BC in the work of Chinese philosopher and reformer Confucius, who said: ‘I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.’

Through engaging actively with text, students gain ownership of it. Shakespeare ceases to be high art, a dead unapproachable cultural icon whose value and meaning is set in stone. By creating their own interpretations of a play or scene, students make it relevant to themselves, and in doing so play a part in reinventing Shakespeare for the current age, making the plays worth studying.

The benefits of creative approaches to Shakespeare are probably best expressed by the students themselves. The comments below are typical.

Before we started the new work, all the sitting and reading out was boring. And I couldn’t see the point of Shakespeare at all. First time we did the active work I felt a bit silly but I became more confident. I thought people would mess about but they were taking it seriously and it made me want to do it properly.

I used to get embarrassed about the language because I was worried I would say the words wrong. But now we have looked at the words in detail and done ‘hook, probe’ (see page 48–52) I don’t worry about saying them out. Now I can think about what they mean.

These were my best lessons in school, ever. I think this work benefits because with just writing, you don’t get into the words. I think I understand why Shakespeare uses his words. The language is different and active work has helped me to understand the language.

I enjoyed the tasks and activities we had to do … they helped me understand Shakespeare more. Understanding the words was difficult but the activities helped me. I did well. I thought the lessons were brilliant. I would like to do more of this work because of GCSE. I could get high grades.

The text is central to learning

All we know for certain about Shakespeare’s plays are contained in the words of the plays themselves. Everything else, including many of the stage directions which were added later by editors of play editions, is conjecture or a ‘best guess’. All we have are the words, and they are all we need, for everything that is necessary to know about the play is found in the text itself. For this reason activities in this book centre around text, either working with the text directly or through a series of exercises that will help students to access text. Engagement with the text at all times remains the primary goal. In a rehearsal room actors may have spent some time researching their role, but in the rehearsals themselves they are focused on interpreting the words of the play and how their character relates to those around them. This is how they create or discover meaning. The text here is not passive. In a rehearsal the function of language is not to be beautiful or poetic (although it may be both). Language here is physical. Characters speak because they want to communicate a desire or idea – to get something, or to make something happen.

When we study a play with students we often often talk about it in terms of divisions, e.g. plot, character, language. While these can be useful they are, to an extent, artificial. Everything is in the language of the play and it should always be at the centre of any study. This does not mean that it is sacred in any way – in fact, quite the opposite. While Globe Education never changes the actual words or meaning of the text for an exercise, it is frequently cut to maximize learning, or to achieve a particular learning objective. The importance of language and the freedom to cut text lie at the heart of all the approaches in the book. Ways of cutting text are explored in detail on pages 31–6.

The importance of the text does not mean it is always the starting point of sessions. Globe Education Consultant Chris Stafford always maintains ‘the words are the last thing’ when planning an exercise for young people. His point is that it is important to engage with why a character speaks before they speak. Exploring the story of the play is a powerful tool and central to many of the approaches in this book. The universal power of the stories and characters’ dilemmas and choices are one of the reason...

Table of contents

• Related titles from the Arden Shakespeare
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• The beginning: A guide to using Creative Shakespeare
• 1 Key principles and ideas for Creative Shakespeare
• 2 Context: Learning from the Globe
• 3 Core approaches to Creative Shakespeare
• 4 Language: Inside out
• 5 Actor, stage and audience
• 6 Performance
• 7 Learning through Shakespeare
• Appendix 1: Menus
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright