Introduction
My first encounter with William Shakespeare was in seventh grade; my teacher at the time had us reading Romeo and Juliet. Right from the prologue I was immediately hypnotized by the poetic movement of the language that Shakespeare used to create such vivid images of these two young lovers approaching a disastrous fate. I remember swooning over Romeo and becoming a tad jealous of how lucky Juliet was to have had such a romantic guy. But what finally essentially captured my heart was seeing the live performance. Once we finished reading the play, our class had a field trip to the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts to see Romeo and Juliet live on stage. It took my breath away. The meaning of the beautiful language became so clear through seeing it performed rather than read. I was hooked. Later in high school, we again read Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade and Macbeth later on in eleventh grade, when it quickly soared to become my favorite Shakespeare play.
In teaching sixth grade English/Language Arts, I’ve always had to put my love of Shakespeare’s stories on the backburner; it’s always been argued that sixth graders are not mentally prepared to handle the difficult language in reading Shakespeare. People think that eleven year olds cannot find relevance within the plays that are appropriate for their age group. However, scholars and art directors have found that this point is invalid. Lara Bobraff is a Globe Education Practitioner that currently works at the recreated Globe Theatre in London. She says that her and her team work with over 70,000 students a year from around the world—some students as young as five years old— on reading, acting, and analyzing Shakespeare’s plays and characters. This is her argument for why young children are preferable to teach Shakespeare to:
“I think if you get children young then they’re excited about the stories they’re excited about the characters—they think Twelfth Night is fantastic because there is a character called Sir Toby Belch who burps--they haven’t learned yet to be cynical and scared and worried about it …they haven’t learned yet that Shakespeare is boring, dull, and difficult.”1
I agree with Lara Bobraff when she says the younger the students are when exposed to Shakespeare, the less ‘scary’ he becomes; I see myself as a testament to that since I was twelve and had already established an acquaintance with Shakespeare. I think being taught Shakespeare at that age helped me immensely in being successful later on in high school. I can attest to this notion in my students as well. One year, my sixth grade students were asked to visit the Advanced Placement British Literature class and watch their performance of Macbeth My sixth graders loved it! They were instantly engaged and enthralled with the language; they were able to summarize what the seniors were acting out by relating it to their prior knowledge. They asked thought-provoking questions about the word choices, the characters choices and the actors’ movements. Thus, my students have proven to me that if given the right strategies and models—film or visual aids and a variety of good and bad examples—they can they can break down difficult, higher-grade level text.
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