Adapting Literature

Introduction and Rationale

Shakespeare is certainly not the easiest subject matter to tackle at the high school level. That's not to say that students won't enjoy it once they are into the characters and plots, but more often than not, the sheer mention of his name can instill fear and loathing in the high school classroom. Even for the adult reader, college student, or literary scholar, be honest, Shakespearean English can be a feat.

For this reason, high school English teachers often shy away from his 38 plays and 154 sonnets, among other poems, and students aren't getting a healthy dose of Shakespeare. To compound the lack of usage, those who do teach Shakespeare rarely properly prepare the readers; without a hook¹ or proper introduction, students shut down and reject difficult material. Hence, my goal is to bring Shakespeare into the classroom and develop a unit which can be fun, easy, modern, and different.

I want students to view Shakespeare as relevant, interesting, and new. I'm using Othello, which isn't inevitably recognized by the students. I hope this will prevent them from dismissing the play prior to our investigation. I have found students to discard the idea of reading Romeo and Juliet, for example, simply because they know the name, the difficulty of the language, and maybe the story line. Othello possesses qualities which I intend to use as motivation—a racy subject, several modern adaptations, and only a few major characters to memorize.

This unit is a tool for anyone who wishes to teach Shakespeare, Othello in particular, or who wants to introduce film, adaptations, and new research skills. On the other hand, I wouldn't discontinue reading this unit, merely because you aren't planning to teach Shakespeare's Othello using adaptations. I plan to stay true to the idea that this is, first and foremost, a teaching tool and can be adopted for many reasons and adapted to meet the needs of any film, literature, reading, or writing assignment.

Shakespeare and Othello

Orson Welles offers an opinion of Othello that I share, although he doesn't proclaim his notions to be axiomatic.² He says that Othello is one of the twelve best plays ever written, nine of which, by the way, come from Shakespeare. That's pretty substantial, and given that I trust Welles as an authority on this subject, I'll say that Othello is something worth using in the classroom. There are reasons for this. Othello withstands the tests of time. The themes found in this oh-so-ancient play are oh so relevant today. What's better than racy subject matter when trying to get young people hooked on learning? I actually don't see any other way in getting students to take a second look at Shakespeare, or a first for that matter.

Getting a Short Synopsis of Othello³

Of course you can pick up a copy of CliffsNotes, and I actually advocate this. Using resources like CliffsNotes or SparkNotes.com4 isn't shameful. This can help with a number of things. Just the same as using this unit to teach Othello, using these resources isn't cheating; why reinvent the wheel when something is provided? Such resources supply teachers and students with summaries, quote explanations, theme and character analysis, quizzes, essay topics, and much more.

Film in the Classroom

Film can be used as part of the high school English curriculum. I would say, speculating of course, that most English teachers and maybe most teachers in general use film to supplement curricular materials. Reading Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and showing the film staring John Malkovich is an example. But genuinely teaching film is a different story. Showing students that film is an art form of its own, and that adaptations can exist separately from the original source, is different from simply complementing a reading selection with film.

I'll be the first to admit that I could do a much better job with film in the classroom. I'm learning—I have the luxury now of doing so—that it can be quite simple. In the past, I've used film to solidify a reading. I've looked for movies with some fidelity to an existing text, hoping to help students understand what they've read. But film can be used, with a little preparation, as more than supplemental. Of Mice and Men can be more than a comparison to Steinbeck's novelette; it's more than the book shown on screen.

For the purpose of this unit, it should be clear, when I mention using film in the classroom, I'm speaking primarily of adaptation. The films used in this unit were chosen because they have been made using an original literary source. I'm sure that some of the lessons in this unit can be used with film as a sole source for teaching, but here, the plan is to use adaptation to stimulate student questioning.