Overview
Analyzing literature is like detective work. Detectives need to know what they are looking for. Then they search for evidence. Finally they need to decide what the evidence proves. The search would have little meaning if the detective had no goal in mind.
Before delving into one of Shakespeare's plays, my twelfth graders begin by reading the sonnets. This is part of school district required curriculum. Never before, however, have we approached them with any particular focus. We would review the structure of a sonnet and notice its rhyme scheme, interpret its meaning, and look for the shift in tone. The publisher of our anthology would have chosen the sonnets. We would not do much comparing of one to another, but read each as if in a vacuum.
I would like to make our reading of the sonnets more meaningful and a more coherent part of a larger theme. In other words, I would like to provide my students with a goal. I propose a curriculum unit in which my students become sleuths as they study Shakespeare's sonnets. While I would still like my students to be familiar with the form and structure of a sonnet, I would also like them to no longer read each one on its own. I would place my students into working groups and ask them to examine a number of sonnets. Each group would be assigned a theme, and then they would begin their detective work. There are many possible themes. For example, what does Shakespeare say about love and romance? When Shakespeare fills a sonnet with economic terms, what is he saying about money and its connection to other aspects of life? How did he feel about aging and mortality, and even the afterlife? With my guidance, students would search for and hopefully find much evidence in the sonnets to enable intelligent discussion of each theme. They would still be required to read and understand five to seven sonnets, but with a purpose in mind. The culminating activity would be for each group to teach the class what they have discovered, proving their theses with evidence presented in power point presentations.
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