Overview
A Case of Inspiration
The intended outcome of this unit is for students to read Shakespeare's Macbeth in its entirety. In the process, they will use the performance triangle strategy, described in detail throughout this curriculum unit. The purpose of this focused strategy is to frame the reading of the play, as well as the written pieces and discussion that students will produce. These written pieces and discussions will be centered on how the myriad themes and literary devices contribute to the multiple meanings of the play. Additionally, they will be presented with secondary source material to accompany the play's reading. The classroom activities and lessons themselves are an extension of this model.
My passion for reading and discussing Shakespeare was instilled in me as a fourteen-year-old eighth grade student, the year in which I was chosen by my teachers to play the role of William Shakespeare himself at the inaugural St. Joseph School Shakespeare Festival. It was my duty to act as host for the performances, in which students of all grade levels prepared selected scenes from the plays. At the festival, I also played the conspirator Decius in a performance of Julius Caesar, and the sheer wonder I experienced while reading and memorizing my lines truly inspired me to become a teacher of literature. In my collegiate and professional career as an educator, I have continually looked for ways to approach Shakespeare pedagogy. I want my students to have the same meaningful experience that I did in studying Shakespeare, and it is in this spirit that I approach this curriculum unit.
In presenting a work of literature to students, teachers often times struggle with what I call the balance between established or traditional ways of teaching the material and their own creative strategies for approaching the work. With Shakespeare's most popular and most often-taught works, there is an exhausting wealth of resources for teachers. It can be quite overwhelming. For example, in teaching Macbeth, I researched teaching resources, but soon realized that I was adrift in a seemingly endless ocean of activities. Some were interesting, but most were poor. With this in mind, this unit is meant to offer a method by which to teach Shakespeare, and, specifically, his play Macbeth.
In the role of a teacher, I find it fascinating to encounter some of the ideas in approaching Shakespeare that I did not experience as a high school and college student, as well as dismaying to discover what some students are being subjected to. What, I asked myself, is exactly being taught? Is it how to summarize a five-act play? I also asked myself what should be taught while reading a Shakespeare play. Should teachers simply focus on plot comprehension, which students often struggle with? Or, should teachers focus on extraction and discussion of themes? I believe that the understanding of concepts such as 'soliloquy' and 'iambic pentameter' is just as important as all these other topics, especially for an Advanced Placement course. The reality of it is that each of these concepts is directly connected to the others, and that, in presenting Shakespeare to students, there is an opportunity to provide a multifaceted and well-rounded exploration of the text. It is important to mention, too, that I believe that this unit is fully accessible to any teacher interested in a rigorous and engaging study of Macbeth.
Engaging Students in Shakespeare
The intended student participants for whom this unit is written are twelfth graders in an Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition course. The unit is five weeks long, and fifty-minute class meetings are held four times per week. Teachers who meet with their students five times per week can easily modify the schedule of activities to fit their own needs. Usually, the first barrier encountered in teaching Shakespeare is the students' lack of comprehension. Many good teachers have succeeded in readying students for Shakespeare with appropriate background lessons, or prior knowledge activities, but needless to say, once the text is in hand, many students experience a shock that comes with the contact with Shakespeare's language.
Most senior high school students, mine included, will have already encountered one or more Shakespeare plays throughout their education. I will provide students with tools to access the language as part of this unit, but by no means is the comprehension of the plot the focus. Students will know that my expectation is that they work hard to use those tools to grasp the plot, but that is just the beginning. In this course, most of the reading will be done for homework. I am counting on student preparedness (which has not been an issue in the past), to take them beyond comprehension and into literary analysis and critical thinking. As a teacher of an AP course, I am responsible for teaching specific skills, concepts, and content to prepare students for the AP exam near the end of the school year. These include the analytical skills needed to write about and discuss poetry and prose, as well as the skill of making intra-textual and inter-textual connections. Additionally, AP courses are writing intensive. Students are expected to write in a variety of ways. Most of my students will have taken the AP English Language and Composition course as eleventh-graders. Therefore, they will have a foundation of rhetorical skills, and the AP English Literature course aspires to build upon this foundation.
In order to foster good, meaningful topics for writing and discussion, I have created an original method for helping students study the concept of 'performance' in Macbeth, which is detailed below. Specifically, I envision a strategy that will help students discover the multilayered elements of performance that make up the genius of Shakespeare. I envision a graphic organizer as the central building block that will guide students to identify three facets of performance that are relevant to Macbeth, namely, 1) the character of Macbeth performing various roles within the play; 2) the role of the actor in performing the characters in Macbeth, from text to stage; and 3) the concept of performance brought to the text by the individual reader/audience member in his everyday environment. The central graphic will be a 'Performance Triangle' with each side representing a separate facet of 'performance.' The strategy will not be limited to Macbeth's character, but any relevant character. In this way, students will read and discuss the play through these multiple lenses, which will lead to discussion and writing about the relationships of these lenses and how they contribute to the overall meanings of the play. To accompany the play, I will also provide appropriate secondary sources for students to read and discuss, such as essays from the fields of sociology and the theater.
Students will come to an understanding of the recurring theme of self and performance in this play through close reading and rigorous engagement with the text, with a focus on how these readings are supportive of, and informed by, our central three-dimensional strategy. Classroom activities and exercises such as staged readings, annotation, and activating prior knowledge and experience will focus on the multiple voices and personas of characters. I also envision a final project for the unit in which students will write an essay about a particular character using the performance triangle strategy.
The unit aims to create relevancy for students as they become aware of the figurative language and literary devices that people use to 'perform' in their everyday lives. In teaching Macbeth, I was pleasantly surprised at how strongly students identified with the characters in the play. Upon reflecting, however, I realized that teachers should not be surprised at how eighteen-year-old students would be fascinated with the motivations, decisions, and emotions expressed by these characters. One particular quote that really spoke to many of my students was "Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't." They all knew friends, classmates, and family members who did just the same. They argued about who was responsible for Macbeth's downfall- was it Lady Macbeth's manipulation and ambition, Macbeth's vacillating inner conflict, or the weird sisters themselves, whose prophecies portend realities? To develop a plausible argument about this question, students must be challenged to closely study the dialogue and speech that so brilliantly lends itself to interpretation of the inward and outward performances, or presentations of self, of the characters in the play.
Although the goal of the unit is to help students prepare for the AP exam at the end of the year, it is important for them to understand that there are many other reasons to study Shakespearean performance. The value of studying Shakespeare will last beyond the looming hurdle of the exam. A well-planned curriculum unit in Shakespeare is valuable because it provides the kind of rigorous experience needed to adequately prepare high school students for success at the postsecondary level.
Not only is the study of Shakespeare valuable in the academic world, however. Shakespeare teaches us a great deal about the human condition, and asks the universal question: "to be, or not to be?" In addition, the English language is not easy to imagine in its present state without Shakespeare, who contributed countless idioms and expressions to our everyday lexicon. This fact is a way to get young people interested in Shakespeare, but it is also, in a way, culturally valuable to recognize and appreciate. As Marjorie Garber writes in her book Shakespeare and Modern Culture, "Shakespeare has scripted many of the ideas that we think of as 'naturally' our own and even as 'naturally' true: ideas about human character, about individuality, about selfhood, about government, about men and women, youth and age, about the qualities that make a strong leader." 1 She also points out that many fields of study and work outside of literature and the theatre have also been strongly influenced by Shakespeare, including psychology, law, politics, business, and medicine. In this way, the study of Shakespeare is a pursuit of limitless relevancy to our lives and our world.
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