The Art of Biography

    So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
    So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
    (William Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII)
  

Content Objectives

Introduction

Former British Prime Minister James Callagan once noted "a lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on." It doesn't take much for a lie to become a truth, especially in the high school setting. Idle gossip started during second-period will spread like wildfire across campus and, by day's end, a schoolmate's reputation lies in tatters.

Today, social media—Twitter, Facebook, SnapChat—makes things easier, but, centuries ago, the masters did it better using a medium of their day: the five-act play. By creating a blatantly false retelling of the history of King Richard III in both Henry VI and Richard III, William Shakespeare sacrificed a king's reputation, even "advocating regicide" ¹ in order to secure Queen Elizabeth's patronage and maintain his theater company's standing in London (not to mention keeping his own head atop his shoulders). Five hundred years later, it is this monstrous version of Richard that is remembered.

A five hundred year old mystery—the whereabouts of the gravesite of England's infamous king—became a trending topic in newspapers and on the Internet in late 2012. The recovery of the king's skeleton—in an anonymous, ignoble grave beneath a car park—has reintroduced Richard III to modern society. The release of gravesite photographs reignited a fascination with one of England's most notorious monarchs. No longer is Shakespeare part of a distant, dusty past; instead, we have a rare opportunity to use current events to introduce the subject of one of Western Literature's Literature's most enduring plays to a new generation of students.

In this unit, students will read Richard III; explore the relationship between biographer, reader, and topic; research the biographies of King Richard III, Queen Elizabeth I, and William Shakespeare; and analyze Shakespeare's purpose and the consequential effect of misrepresenting the king.

Background

At my site—Independence High School in East Side San Jose, a lower socioeconomic neighborhood—English is the only course required for all four years of high school: all other subjects vary in requirement from a single year, with most requiring two to three years. Students who are on-track, fluent English speakers, and mainstreamed will take English 2 during their sophomore year. This unit can be adapted for a pre-Advanced Placement classroom or be taught as a cross-curricular unit with World History, AP World History, or AP European History.

My English 2 students come from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds: 37% are Asian, 35% are Hispanic, and 20% are Filipino; the Caucasian population is officially considered statistically insignificant at just 3.5% of the total school population. 43% of our students qualify nationally for the Free/Reduced Lunch Program and a total of 53% of our students are categorized as being socio-economically disadvantaged. Finally, 19% of our students are targeted English Language Learners and 29.3% are Redesignated Fluent English Proficient having acquired the language at native speaking levels.

In 2012, my school made a 3-point gain on the Academic Performance Index (API), a measure of our school's scholastic ability and progress as part of the state's Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999, bringing scores from 762 to 765 (out of 1000 points and with a statewide target of 800). While this demonstrates continued, positive growth, we did not meet our overall growth target because our socio-economically disadvantaged students, an important subgroup, did not make its growth target. As such, my site remains a Program Improvement school for its sixth straight year. Equally discouraging, the Early Assessment Program for the state university level indicates that just 37% of our students are prepared for college-level English; 63% require remediation at the university level.

Despite their cultural diversity and socioeconomic disparity, all of my students agree on a few things in my mainstream English 2 classroom: Shakespeare is hard, Shakespeare is confusing, Shakespeare has nothing to do with their lives today in modern American culture, and we should just skip the Shakespeare unit for something more fun like, you know, anything else.

Your Brain on Shakespeare

But, says eager beaver, Bard-obsessed English teacher, Shakespeare is good for you. As educators—and especially educators of literature—we've always suspected that reading something for the mere reason that it is hard has value in and of itself. But now researchers at the University of Liverpool have completed a study that indicates that the human brain benefits from reading complex works from authors like William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, William Wordsworth, and T.S. Eliot. These researchers included scientists, psychologists, and English academics. They monitored brain activity as volunteers read these difficult texts, then compared these scans against reading the same text translated, so to speak, into present-day English.

The challenging, original texts "set off far more electrical activity in the reader's brain than the more pedestrian versions." ² With the aid of electroencephalography, it was shown that the reading and interpreting of challenging texts causes both hemispheres of the brain to light up—the right, responsible for memory and emotion, as well as the left, responsible for processing language. As Phillip Davis, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, England, stated at the North of England Education Conference in January 2013, "Serious literature acts like a rocket-booster to the brain." ³ It's more than just our love for the Bard that warrants his inclusion in our classrooms: Shakespeare's voice—his syntax, diction, figurative language, and imagery—stimulates the brain because the reader must work hard to process and comprehend Shakespeare's language.

Although our brains were not originally designed to read the printed word, we have adapted to the technology. Reading is already a highly developed neurological activity, but reading complicated texts requires the brain to "shift mental pathways, [creating] new thoughts, shapes, and connections in the young and staid alike." ⁴ Shakespeare manipulated words while English was still emerging as a world language, shifting nouns into verbs and creating new words and phrases. His use of metaphor—"He childed as I fathered" and "To lip a wanton in a secure couch/And to suppose her chaste" and "Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York"—demands the brain's flexibility and athleticism to understand his syntax and figurative language. In short, Shakespeare makes us smarter.

Earlier, I referenced Twitter, Facebook, and SnapChat. Not only can these modern devices destroy a reputation in nanoseconds, they also might be destroying our students' ability to read and comprehend lengthy text. At the elementary and secondary level, students have become too used to reading and processing short chunks of text on small screens like smartphones and tablets. Reading 140-characters does not require the same stamina and intellectualism as reading Richard III: at 1689-characters, the opening soliloquy alone is more than ten times longer than an average tweet. Our classroom assignments sometimes aren't much better: literature textbooks mainly focus on the short story and the poem instead of a full play or novel, and the short passages students must parse for state exams rarely fill a page. This chunking does not challenge their brains, nor does it teach students the stamina for handling the longer prose they will need at the college level and in the working world.

The new, national Common Core State Standards indicate that, by the end of grade 10, students should be able to read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, at the high end of the grades 9–10 text complexity band independently and proficiently. Shakespeare is a natural fit for this objective.